


Conjoined

by TheGlintOfTheRail



Category: Hannibal (TV), Star Trek
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hannibal (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Betazoid!Will, Gore, HanniTrek, Hannibal Lecter is still a cannibal, I’m asking him why he’s sUCH A FUCKING ASSHOLE, I’m staring at the man in the mirror, M/M, Will Graham and the terrible horrible no good very bad entire existence, Will Graham is still an empath, a worse violation of Will Graham's bodily autonomy than the ear thing if you can believe it, but they are aliens and it's in space, just go with it, trill!Hannibal, trill!Will, tw: author enjoys laughing at your pain
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-25 01:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 22
Words: 57,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6174526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGlintOfTheRail/pseuds/TheGlintOfTheRail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The new Trill passenger on the USS Chesapeake seems friendly enough. But there's something a little off about him. Something Lieutenant Commander Will Graham can't quite put his finger on, even after reading his emotions.</p><p>It's probably nothing. Will's probably just being paranoid. Doctor Lecter seems like a decent guy. And it's been a long time since anyone's offered to be Will Graham's friend...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feverdreambloodopera](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feverdreambloodopera/gifts).



Will Graham leaned against the wall by the breakroom replicator, drinking his coffee and trying to will himself to be slightly less pissed off. His day just kept on getting worse. First he’d been dragged out of Engineering for some pointless meeting that had lasted all morning, then there’d been a near-rupture in one of the plasma conduits that he’d had to scramble to fix before something caught fire… and _then_ , he’d found out that they’d be taking on passengers at Alpha III. And unless they all happened to be Vulcans, that meant Will was going to have to spend anything from the next few days to the next several months with his guard up and his teeth permanently gritted.

Will was one of only a handful of non-Vulcan crewmembers aboard his ship, and that was just how he liked it. That was why he'd requested this posting- Vulcans were easy to be around. Not the warmest people, maybe, but Will could relax around Vulcans. He could let his shaky mental walls down a little, in a way that he couldn’t with almost anybody else. And he was pretty sure that the crew actually sort of liked having an empath around, since he was a constant, visible reminder to maintain strict emotional control.

It wasn’t that Vulcans were incapable of experiencing the strong feelings that other humanoids felt, the ones that could knock Will on his ass if he wasn't careful. It was just that they had incredible self-control, and could _choose_ not to experience them. Will had often envied them that. He knew most other humanoids found Vulcans a little off-putting, even disturbing, in their pursuit of a life free from emotion, but Will thought it sounded peaceful. Like floating in a still pond, as opposed to the crashing waves he was used to.

He still picked up on plenty from the Vulcans, they weren’t made of stone. There was always a buzz of their suppressed emotions just below his consciousness, and countless times a day he would get flashes of something more - contentment, irritation, disapproval, affection. But it was all more or less muted, except for the occasional nightmare.

But now they were taking on passengers, and that was never good. He knew the non-Vulcan crew members’ work schedules and habits and could easily avoid them when he wanted to, but passengers might turn up anywhere, and you never knew what they’d be like. It was always annoying to have them onboard, at the very least, but every now and then they would turn out to be a complete disaster. Like the time before last, when they’d been transporting a dozen extremely drunk and rowdy Klingons back home from a wedding. He’d managed to tough it out for four or five days before he’d gotten so overwhelmed that he’d had to go on sick leave, and then he'd spent the next week hiding out in his quarters, completely non-functional, with their joy and jealousy and rage and excitement screaming through his mind. Not to mention their secondhand hangovers, which had lasted for another solid week after they’d disembarked.

If there were going to be Klingons this time, Will thought he might just put in for shore leave and sit this trip out. The Captain would probably let him, after how useless he’d been before. He pulled out his PADD and went looking for the passenger manifest.

He didn’t see any Klingons – and oh, fantastic, it was mostly a bunch of Vulcan scientists on their way to a newly discovered class-M planet. Then a couple of Tellarite traders – not ideal, but they were only going to Earth, and he was sure he could avoid them until then if they turned out to be a problem. And… ah, crap. A Trill.

Will generally went out of his way to avoid other Trill. They were always so friendly when they first met him, even after they noticed his jet-black eyes - but he made them uncomfortable, too, and it wasn’t as if they could hide that fact. Not from him, of all people. 

Every time Will had thought he’d hit it off with another Trill, sooner or later he’d be nearby when they felt some emotion they would rather have kept secret. And then they’d just _look_ at him. And they’d know that he knew, and he’d know that they knew that he knew, and it would be horrendously awkward for both of them, and then... well, he’d never managed to keep another Trill as a friend for long.

And it hurt, to be seen as an alien by what he still thought of as his own people.

He wished he could avoid the Trill passenger like he planned to avoid the Tellarites. But apparently they were going to be carting this Doctor Lecter halfway across the Alpha Quadrant, and it wasn’t that big of a ship. Sooner or later they were going to run into each other. And then, knowing Trill, he was going to have to be social.

Oh, well. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad – maybe he’d even turn out to be one of the rare Trill who could look Will in the eye without flinching.

Or maybe he’d find Will so off-putting that he’d decide to avoid him for the rest of the trip. That was a lot more likely. Will almost found himself looking forward to meeting the man, so that they could get it over with.

* * *

They made Alpha III after Will’s shift ended, and departed two days later with a full cargo hold and the dreaded passengers, but it was two days after that before Will finally met Doctor Lecter. He stepped out of Engineering on his way to repair a faulty replicator and saw a man coming toward him up the corridor, and by the time he noticed the telltale Trill spots it was too late to duck back around the corner and hide. The man noticed him, smiled, increased his pace slightly. He was coming over to introduce himself.

Ugh. Fine. It had to happen sometime.

The doctor was tall and graceful, elegant even – he carried himself almost like a Vulcan, Will thought. Brown hair, brown eyes, angular features, and his spots were unusual, almost more maroon than brown. From twenty meters away, he didn’t seem to be feeling anything particularly noteworthy. Mostly Will was picking up mild interest.

But then he took a few steps closer, and suddenly there was so much more. More of _him_. There was still that same interest, but it wasn’t being felt by just one man. Will could sense close to a dozen different hims, all there in one body, vibrating through and around one another, all just slightly out of sync. It made Will think of a room walled with mirrors, with this man – or, more precisely, with the man that this man had once been – standing in the center, throwing endless reflections.

How odd, Will thought. The passenger manifest never mentioned that he was joined.

The man stopped in front of Will and extended his hand, while Will did what he could to throw up his mental walls and muffle the unsettling echoes of his mind. “Doctor Hannibal Lecter,” the man said. “It’s a pleasure to see another Trill aboard.”

Will took his hand. “Lieutenant Commander Will Graham,” he said, and he made no effort not to meet Doctor Lecter’s eyes.

He felt the doctor notice their striking blackness, felt him realize what Will was. Will sensed a tiny note of apprehension from him then, as he usually did when he met someone new, but mostly there was interest – a sudden burst of interest that was, in comparison with the doctor’s previous emotions, surprisingly intense.

That was strange, and it made Will feel oddly exposed. People were usually curious about him, but they were rarely _this_ curious. But then, the man was a medical doctor as well as a Trill. There was probably some professional interest there. As far as Will knew, he was the only half-Trill, half-Betazoid alive.

“Lovely to meet you, Lieutenant Commander,” Doctor Lecter said. “Listen – I see that you’re working, and I won’t impose on your time. But may I ask you to have a drink with me in Ten Forward, perhaps in two or three days?” The man’s different selves were still shifting and merging, and that sharp-edged interest was flickering across them all, pulsing brightly here, dimly there. It was enough to give Will a touch of vertigo, and he was only getting it secondhand. He wondered how Doctor Lecter could stand to feel that all the time.

“Sure,” Will said. Clearly there would be no getting out of this. “The day after tomorrow? 1900 hours?”

“I look forward to it,” said the doctor, and smiled politely again before continuing down the corridor.

* * *

Will wondered about the doctor off and on for the rest of the day, and as soon as he got back to his quarters he called up the passenger manifest again. There he was, Doctor Hannibal Lecter, civilian medical doctor, travelling to fill a temporary teaching post at a small medical school all the way out by Deep Space Three. There was no mention of his being joined.

On a whim, he did a public records search for Doctor Lecter. He seemed to be a real enough person – there were lists of degrees and awards, known addresses, a few images. All in all, the man seemed to be fairly accomplished but not terribly noteworthy, and as far as Will could tell, he had never even applied for joining.

But there was no chance that Will was mistaken. He had met a number of joined Trill in his life, and they were nothing like any other mind he had ever felt. Doctor Lecter was definitely joined – which meant that he was not, in fact, simply Doctor Lecter. Whether the man’s name had once been Hannibal Lecter or something else entirely, he was now only the central part of a greater whole. He was himself, and he was also his symbiont, and he was also every other man and woman who had ever carried it.

When the surgeons had implanted the symbiont inside of him, its mind had merged with his, and the mind of every one of its previous Trill hosts had come with it. All of those other hosts’ memories were his memories, now, and to a certain degree so were their personalities, their feelings and desires. As the current host, the man who had perhaps once been Doctor Hannibal Lecter was still at the center, but all of the other hosts were there, too. All of them were part of him. All of them _were_ him.

Judging from the number of overlapping selves Will had sensed inside of the doctor, this particular symbiont had been joined at least ten or twelve times, moving from host to host as each of them in turn lived out their lifespan and died. To have experienced that many lives, it almost certainly couldn’t be less than five hundred years old, which meant, in a sense, that Doctor Lecter couldn’t be less than five hundred years old, even if his body was barely fifty.

But none of this made any sense. Joined Trill were revered, they were pillars of society. Will couldn’t imagine why one of them would go to this much trouble to pretend not to be joined.

He ought to tell the Captain, probably. But he might as well ask Doctor Lecter about it himself, first. He didn't want the guy to think he'd gone behind his back.


	2. Chapter 2

Generally speaking, Will made a point of not being terribly social. For the most part, it was easy – all the Vulcans cared about was how well he could do his job, which luckily for him was very well. The few other crewmen, he humored by socializing with them precisely as much as was necessary to stay in their good graces without encouraging them to pursue his friendship any further. It was an easy balance to strike, since he knew exactly how they felt about him. Too much overt friendliness and he’d bow out of a couple of plans, a touch of coldness and he’d invite them for lunch. Aside from that, he was as alone as he could manage to be.

It was just so exhausting to have to _focus_ on other people, particularly people whose emotional landscapes he didn’t already know. Exhausting to sit and make small talk while thinking “she’s covering her anxiety really well” or “I wonder who it is he’s grieving” or “wow, this woman does not care for her boyfriend _at all_.” No matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t shut their feelings out completely, and the longer he tried to shut them out the more difficult it became. And beyond that, there was always the risk that more than one person at the table would turn out to have a short fuse, or be going through a bad breakup, and then Will would have to excuse himself before he punched a wall or started crying in the fetal position. Easier to avoid those situations in the first place.

So, while Will wasn't exactly dreading his drink with Doctor Lecter, he wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, either.

* * *

Ten Forward was almost empty when Will arrived. He was right on time – after so many years in Starfleet, it was a habit he couldn’t break – and the doctor was already there, sitting at a table by one of the windows and gazing out at the stars, his selves all apparently lost in thought.

Will signaled to the bartender and sat down across from Doctor Lecter, who turned his attention toward Will and smiled. His feelings were largely the same as before – interested, curious, pleased to see him. _We’ll see how long that lasts,_ Will thought.

“Lieutenant Commander Graham,” said Doctor Lecter. “I didn’t see you come in.”

“I noticed,” Will said. “I almost hated to interrupt you. It really is beautiful, isn’t it? Have you spent much time in space?”

“Not for many years,” said Doctor Lecter, and Will wondered if he was talking about Hannibal Lecter or about the symbiont. The joined only sometimes made any distinction between the two. Possibly he’d been remembering some journey that one of his hosts had taken hundreds of years ago.

The waiter approached them and took their drink orders, starting with Doctor Lecter. “Oh,” he said, “I’ll have one of whatever the Lieutenant Commander is having.”

“Feel free,” said Will, “but I don’t think you’re gonna like it. Have you ever heard of whiskey?”

“It sounds vaguely familiar. I believe I’ll try it.”

“Ok,” said Will. “Just remember I warned you.”

Their drinks arrived a moment later, and Doctor Lecter picked up his whiskey and sipped it.

The muscles in his neck tensed underneath his spots.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes, I see.”

“Is it that terrible?” Will asked. “Let me get you something else.”

“Oh, no, there’s no need,” said Doctor Lecter. “Actually, I rather enjoyed it. And one should never turn away from a new experience.”

He took another sip, and winced slightly less this time.

“So,” he said, “tell me, wherever did you manage to acquire a taste for this?”

And from there, it was the typical get-to-know-you chatter: how do you like Starfleet, what’s your medical specialty, read any good books lately? It was pleasant enough conversation, but it was driving Will ever-so-slightly crazy to sit there and watch Doctor Lecter’s multitude of selves shimmer and flicker like a mirage. It was incredibly distracting.

He had to bring it up sometime. He knew he was going to have to tell the Captain, and it didn’t feel right to do it behind Doctor Lecter’s back. And besides, if he was honest, even though he was rather enjoying himself, a tiny part of him was still hoping to alienate Doctor Lecter into going away and leaving him in peace.

So Will waited until a lull in the conversation, and then he said, “So, why doesn’t the manifest say that you’re joined?”

There was a sharp glance from Doctor Lecter, a jolt of surprise, something like worry. “You can tell?”

Was he really all that surprised, Will wondered? Doctor Lecter knew that Will was an empath. Surely he would have known that he would see it.

“Always,” he said. “Talking to a joined Trill is like being in a crowded room. Only one of you is speaking, but the others are all there, feeling.”

“How strange,” said Doctor Lecter. The worry was melting away, and the curiosity was back, stronger than before. “I’ve met a handful of Betazoids in my time, and I don’t believe they knew until I told them.” He was looking at Will with the same attention he’d directed at the stars earlier. “I hope you don’t mind my saying that Engineering seems a waste of your talents.”

Will had to laugh. “Oh,” he said, “you’d think so, wouldn’t you? Starfleet did, anyway. They recruited me for the security division, they’re always looking for empaths in Security. What a disaster _that_ turned out to be.” He took another sip of his whiskey – those memories usually made him want to get a little drunk. “I mean, it’s a struggle just to deal with the stuff I pick up passively. But to actually go digging around inside somebody else’s head? That’s a thousand times worse. It’s like I turn into them and stop being me.”

He paused. “I guess you’d know what that feels like, actually.”

He felt a little flicker of something from Doctor Lecter then. It wasn’t quite like anything he recognized – it was odd, the way the feelings of joined Trill were often odd – but it was definitely something along the lines of desire.

_Oh,_ he thought, _oh,_ damn _it._

It wasn’t that it bothered Will. He wasn’t particularly interested in Doctor Lecter that way, but he was long past judging people for the things they felt. But he couldn’t begin to count the number of times that something like this had completely derailed a conversation. Nobody liked to realize that such a private feeling was on display to the person it was directed toward, without their having any say in the matter at all. But there was nothing Will could do about it.

He took another drink and braced himself for a wave of embarrassment and a bout of awkward stammering. But Doctor Lecter didn’t acknowledge the feeling at all, to Will’s profound relief.

Instead, he said, “Yes. I do know what that feels like. To stop being me.” He smiled, a little sadly. “My joining was not planned, you see. My previous host was mortally injured many lightyears from Federation space, and I was the only other Trill onboard our ship. Of course I had to agree to host the symbiont, or it would have died as well. So I was joined, and I became Hannibal Fel – that’s my name now, properly. But it was nothing I chose, and I had liked my life as it was. I saw no reason to change it simply because I happened to find myself joined. So, after I settled Lara Fel’s affairs and cleared it with the Symbiosis Commission, I went back to being Hannibal Lecter. That’s who I’ll be, until this host dies and I move to another.”

Will suddenly felt a little guilty. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought it up after all. Clearly Doctor Lecter preferred to keep it to himself, and Will couldn’t blame him. He knew that he’d happily choose to hide his empathy sometimes, if he could.

“And you?” asked Doctor Lecter. “How did you come by _your_ unasked-for gift?”

Will had to cringe at that, a little. _Gift._

“Well,” he said, “my mother was the Betazoid half, but I never knew her. My dad raised me – he had his own cargo ship, and I pretty much grew up in space. He always said he’d send me to school on Betazed when I started to manifest, but it, uh, it came on sooner than he expected. I was ten when it started.”

Ten years old, and the crew had been drunk and happy, celebrating the end of a successful run and looking forward to home, and then someone had thought to wonder where he was. They’d found him in his room, drunk on their drunkenness, hysterical, manic, shaking with laughter. And then they had gotten concerned, and the concern of twenty tipsy men and women had shot through the prism of his mind and suddenly he had been terrified, panicked – and the more they had tried to help him, the more worried they had gotten and the more terrified he had become, and finally he had wedged himself into a corner and screamed and screamed until his father had put everybody else into the emergency shuttles and sent them fifty kilometers away from the ship. Then he had come and sat beside Will and held him, and finally the terror had faded and been replaced by confusion and misery, and Will never had been able to figure out, afterward, how much of that misery had been his and how much had been his father’s.

He must have paused for too long, because Doctor Lecter had to prompt him to get him talking again.

“Ten is quite early. You must be extraordinarily sensitive. “

“Yeah,” Will said. “You could say that.” He resisted the urge to drain the rest of his glass. “After it happened, he took me to Betazed. To see if I could be helped, you know, or trained. But I couldn’t even go down to the planet at first, it was that bad.”

On the ship he’d felt the feelings of twenty people, people he knew, and even that had been too much for him to cope with. But the planet… the planet had been…

They’d tried to take him down, when they’d first arrived. They hadn’t gotten within two miles of the surface before it became clear what a terrible mistake that was. He hadn’t even had the time for a panic attack, then; he just remembered pain like an iron spike through his skull, and a shrieking sound, and he remembered that everything had looked red…

He had woken up back in orbit, in a hospital ship, surrounded by Betazoid doctors. Specialists, trained in dampening their minds in order to work with the highly sensitive. He’d been unconscious for two weeks.

His father had never been able to look at him after that without an overwhelming wash of guilt.

“I’m better now, obviously,” Will said. “They taught me a lot, at Betazed. How to put up walls and all that, and I got to where I could block most of it out if I focused. After a couple of years. But they said there was only so much they could do, and maybe I better consider a career in space. Or else get a little farm in the middle of nowhere. So I figured I’d just keep working with my dad, but then when I was twenty, Starfleet recruited me.”

“Why didn’t you choose the farm?”

“Well…” Will said, “I figured I’d do that if space didn’t work out. But don’t you think it sounds boring?”

Doctor Lecter smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

There was another lull then, and Will took a moment to check in with what Doctor Lecter was feeling. It was easier to see if he unfocused his mind a little, almost like the man was an optical illusion; the personalities were never in complete agreement, but when he allowed them to blur and resolve into one, he could see Doctor Lecter almost as if he were an individual.

There was still that interest, not diminished by the frankness of the conversation they’d been having; there was a hint of that odd desire, not tempered by any embarrassment at the fact that Will must certainly know it was there. Simple pleasure, too, in meeting a man with whom he had something in common.

He _likes_ me, Will thought, slightly bewildered. He couldn’t actually remember the last time that had happened.

Doctor Lecter was speaking again. “I wonder,” he said. “The Betazoids may have been approaching you entirely incorrectly. Would you say that you feel things differently than other Betazoids? Not just more strongly, but differently?”

“…Yeah,” said Will, surprised. “I mean, yes. I don’t have any of the telepathy, half-Betazoids usually don’t, but my empathy, it’s…” He hesitated. How to explain this? “Most Betazoids just know the feelings are there. They can see them. Or if they're very strong or negative, they can be hurt by them. But usually people don’t actually _feel_ the feelings they’re picking up on.”

“Did any of your doctors ever suggest to you,” asked Doctor Lecter, “that the combination of Betazoid and Trill might be inherently unstable?”

“Gee, _thanks_ ,” said Will. “No. They just said that strong empaths sometimes manifest weirdly.”

“I suspect that the instability of your gift may caused by your Trill heritage,” said Doctor Lecter. “It would be natural for the Trill side of you to try to integrate the different personalities in your mind into a single whole. It’s what we’re designed to do. It’s as if you become temporarily joined with every mind you see. You don’t just reflect, you absorb.”

Will had no idea what to say to that. The connection between empathy and joining had never occurred to him before, but now that he had heard it, he was almost certain that Doctor Lecter must be right. And if he was right, then…

“If I’m right,” said Doctor Lecter, “then perhaps Trill methods, rather than Betazoid ones, are the answer to your problem. There are techniques taught to those who are candidates for joining, for quieting one’s past hosts or for bringing them forward. Perhaps they might be useful to you. I would be happy to teach them to you, if you like, since it seems we’ll be sharing this ship for some time.”

This evening was not going at all like Will had expected.

“I… yes!” he said. “I mean – that would be wonderful. Thank you.”

He felt a little guilty, then, when he remembered what he still needed to do.

“Listen… Doctor Lecter…”

“Call me Hannibal,” he said. Will felt guiltier.

“Uh… Hannibal. I know you’d rather keep it to yourself, but I'll have to tell the captain, you know. About you being joined.”

Hannibal smiled. “You haven't told him already? For an empath, you really are quite trusting.” He lifted his empty whiskey glass and tilted it in Will’s direction. “Now then. What would you say to another of these horrible things?”


	3. Chapter 3

In Will’s second year in Starfleet, after he had crashed and burned so spectacularly out of Security, Will had been buried in Engineering on some Vulcan-staffed starbase in the middle of nowhere. It was presented to him as a mercy, an assignment calculated to be as easy on his vulnerable mind as possible… and also, he was sure, calculated to be as deathly dull as possible. Most likely they had hoped to bore him into dropping out of Starfleet altogether. They couldn’t exactly fire him just for being too sensitive, it was against everything the Federation supposedly stood for, but it was perfectly obvious to Will that if they could have just kicked him out, they would have.

He couldn’t even blame them. He _had_ turned out to be a bit of an embarrassment.

And then, to everyone's surprise including his own, Will had begun to excel.

He’d always had a feel for mechanical things – they were so much more straightforward than people were – and with no one but Vulcans for company, he was finally able to focus on something other than avoiding emotional whiplash. He’d become a damned good engineer on that isolated Starfleet base. Good enough to secure a promotion, and then another… and then, eventually, good enough to apply for a post on a starship again.

He almost hadn’t done it. For the first time in his adult life, he was… not content, exactly, but not miserable either. He was afraid to give that up.

But he _was_ finally starting to get bored.

* * *

During his third week on the USS Chesapeake, his new captain had come to him with a proposition. Will had told him, as diplomatically as he was able, to go to hell.

“In case you hadn’t realized,” he’d said, “I’m not Security anymore. Check my file if you want to know why.”

“I have read your _file_ ,” Captain Crawford had said. _(Touchy for a Vulcan_ , Will thought. _This might be the fastest I’ve ever made one of them annoyed with me.)_ “That is, of course, the reason I have approached you.”

“I sure hope you didn’t take me on just because I’m an empath.”

“I ‘took you on’ because you are an exceptional engineer,” said Crawford. “This is a personal request, not an official assignment. All I am asking is for you to keep me informed of anything that strikes you as unusual. It might save a life someday. We have no other empath onboard this ship; surely you can see that it would be irresponsible of me not to make use of my crew’s skills, in whatever way I can?”

Ugh. The man had a point.

“And,” Will had asked, “where does this stop, exactly? Are you going to start asking me to participate in interrogations? Or to deep-read every passenger or diplomat who comes aboard?”

“I will ask you for what I feel is necessary, and you are perfectly free to decline. As you say, you are not Security.”

“And as _you_ say,” Will had replied, “you’ve read my file. If I have another breakdown, can we both agree ahead of time that it was all your fault?”

To Will’s surprise, he’d felt a tiny flutter of something almost like affection from the Captain then. _Good to know. He likes it when I stick up for myself. And he’ll let me give him shit when he deserves it._

“Fine, then,” he’d said. “But I’m not always going to say yes. And I’m not going to let this take my attention away from my job.”

“Nor should you.” The Captain had given him a slight nod – practically the equivalent of a handshake and a slap on the back from a human or a Trill. “Then the matter is settled. Good day, Lieutenant Commander.”

It hadn’t turned out to be as much of a hardship as Will had feared it would, being Crawford’s unofficial pet empath. Once every couple of months he’d just notice some emotional disturbance while going about his regular duties, and he’d report it to the Captain. Usually it was just standard burnout from one of the crew, nothing a little R&R couldn’t fix, but they’d also picked up a handful of petty thieves with his help, and twice he’d identified passengers who had turned out to be violent criminals.

And then, maybe half a dozen times, he’d been called upon to take a deep reading from a prisoner in the brig, to find out if he or she was lying. He performed those deep readings much more reluctantly, and he always took a few days of personal time after. The Captain gave him the time off with no questions asked, and even let him dodge the ship’s counselor; Will knew better than she did how to recover from those episodes, and the very last thing he wanted to do afterward was talk about his feelings.

* * *

The morning after his drink with Hannibal Lecter, when Will strode into the Captain’s ready room without bothering to knock, Crawford just narrowed his eyes a bit rather than throwing Will right back out again and telling him to make an appointment. That was one of the nice things about serving under Vulcans – since they found almost  _all_ non-Vulcan behavior to be bafflingly rude and impulsive, Will didn’t have to spend a lot of mental effort worrying about whether he was being polite enough, because as far as they were concerned, he never was. It was great camouflage.

“Morning, Captain,” he said, dropping into one of the guest chairs as Crawford sighed and set down the report he’d been reading.

“Lieutenant Commander,” said Crawford. The unspoken _this had better be good, Graham_ was heavily implied.

“Listen, there’s – it’s probably nothing, but there’s something you should know,” said Will. “That Trill passenger we have, Doctor Lecter. He’s travelling under a false identity. He’s joined.”

“Yes,” said Crawford, “I am aware of that.”

“You’re – wait,” said Will, “you’re _aware_ of that? How?” He felt slightly deflated; he’d thought he was delivering an important bit of news.

“Since the incident with the stowaway last year, we have been running bioscans of the ship whenever we leave port. You are not to repeat that information to anyone, by the way. When we left Alpha III, the scan was flagged by Security for showing one too many sapient lifeforms aboard, and a closer examination showed that your Doctor Lecter was apparently two distinct organisms. As he is a Trill, the explanation for this was obvious.”

 “And? Did you look into it?”

“I have verified his identity with your Trill Symbiosis Commission, yes,” said Crawford. “He has a legitimate reason for travelling under a false identity. His previous host was a woman named Lara Fel, and –“

“Yeah, I know,” said Will. “He told me.”

“He… told you.” Crawford paused, just long enough for Will to realize that he probably shouldn’t have mentioned that part. “So you felt this was an important enough matter to bring to me directly, but not before discussing it with the very man you were suspicious of.”

“Well,” said Will, “when you put it like _that_ …”

Crawford rubbed his temple. “Lieutenant Commander,” he said evenly, “have you invaded my office this morning simply to repeat information of which I am already aware? Or did you pick up some suspicious feeling from him when you spoke?”

“No,” said Will. “Well… not really. I was paying close attention when he told me about his joining, and I didn’t pick up any of the things I usually feel when someone’s been lying. I think I believe him.”

“But,” said Crawford.

“Yeah, _but_. There was something odd,” said Will. “His name. It didn’t feel right when he told me his name. Both of the names – Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal Fel.”

“You believe he is lying about his name? As I told you, I have verified his identity – “

“No, I... it didn't feel like lying exactly. More like... discomfort? When people say their own names it feels like home. His just didn’t.” Will rubbed at his neck awkwardly; now that he was saying it out loud, it sounded pretty insubstantial. “The thing is, I could be wrong. Reading joined Trill is complicated. It could just be that he feels uncomfortable with his old name because he’s joined, and with the symbiont’s name because he never wanted to be joined in the first place. It’s just that I’m not sure.”

“I have no wish to harass a guest on this ship,” said Crawford, “particularly one of Doctor Lecter’s stature.”

“Right,” said Will, “I probably shouldn’t have even –“

“ _However_ ,” Crawford interrupted, “it would be imprudent to dismiss your concerns out of hand. Most likely there is nothing more to this man than what we already know, but your instincts in these matters have rarely been wrong.”

Will had almost talked himself out of any suspicion at all, but of course Crawford was right. They did have to be sure. And if there was nothing to find, there was nothing to find.

“You will continue to observe the doctor,” said Crawford. “Perhaps you might contrive an excuse to spend more time with him.”

“That… shouldn’t be a problem,” said Will. He had already agreed to meet the doctor the following night, for the first of their training sessions. Not a false pretense. And if he happened to keep an eye out for any other strange flashes of emotion, well, it wasn’t as if he could really help it, anyway.

But he was a little surprised to find himself hoping that he wouldn’t pick up on anything else.


	4. Chapter 4

Will didn’t live on the same deck as the rest of the officers and crewmen. By special arrangement, they’d had quarters set up for him in the far corner of one of the cargo bays. When the ship wasn’t carrying much cargo, Will could simply walk across the floor, but on days like today, when the bay was full to capacity, it took him three ladders and a catwalk just to get to his front door.

He didn’t mind the arrangement at all. His quarters were as isolated a place as it was possible to find aboard a starship, which was to say, not very; but even still, the hassle was well worth the extra bit of peace and quiet it earned him. If they hadn’t given him those quarters, he probably would have wound up sleeping there anyway most nights, curled up in a sleeping bag behind a shipping container. He couldn’t drop his guard completely even there – he hadn’t done that in over twenty years, he wasn’t even sure if he remembered how to anymore – but he could relax just the slightest touch more there than he could on the rest of the ship.

Except that at this exact moment, he wasn’t relaxed at all. An hour before Doctor Lecter – _no, Hannibal, he said call him Hannibal_ – was scheduled to arrive, Will had realized just what a horrifying state his room was in. He hadn’t had a guest in a long damned time, and he’d almost forgotten that tidying up was the minimum expected requirement.

He almost hoped Hannibal would have trouble finding the place. He had offered to meet him in Ten Forward again and lead him back here, but the doctor had shrugged it off, telling him not to trouble himself, that he was sure he could find it on his own.

Will checked the time. Five minutes. “Computer,” he said, in no particular direction, “where is Doctor Hannibal Lecter?”

The warm, familiar female voice told him, “Doctor Hannibal Lecter is in Cargo Bay Three.”

“Shit!”

He was still shoving things into his closet when he heard the musical chime that meant someone was at the door. “Just a minute!” Oh, well. Good enough. Since when was he interested in impressing some random civilian passenger, anyway?

He strode across the room and opened the door for Hannibal. It felt odd to be letting someone else into his quarters, especially someone he barely even knew. But they couldn’t have done this in Hannibal’s quarters. If they were going to be doing any kind of psychic exercise, it had to be down here, where there was as little mental interference as possible.

“Good evening, Will,” Hannibal said with a smile as he stepped through the doorway. He was holding a bottle of something. “A gift for you,” he said, “since you were gracious enough to invite me into your home. But we needn’t drink it together unless you choose, since I’m here in a somewhat professional capacity.”

“Oh,” said Will, “no, I-“

He paused, a little surprised at his reaction to what Hannibal had said. He found he didn’t _want_ to keep their relationship purely professional. He wanted them to be friendly.

 _But I barely know him_ , Will thought; _I don’t even really know who he is... oh, this is ridiculous, I’m being ridiculous-_

“After, maybe,” he said. “Drinking makes it harder to maintain control.”

“Of course.” Hannibal set the bottle down on a side table, and glanced around the room in search of a chair. “Here,“ he said, picked up one of Will’s dining chairs, and carried it to the center of the room. After a moment, Will took the other chair and followed him.

They sat facing each other across his quarters, and Will took another moment to feel extremely awkward before Hannibal said, “I’m getting the impression that you don’t much care for this sort of thing.”

“Socializing or therapy?” Will said, before he could stop himself.

Hannibal smiled. “Therapy. Particularly this type of therapy, the type that involves training your gift.”

Will really wished Hannibal would stop calling it that. “No,” he said. “I got enough of it for one lifetime at Betazed. Or I thought I did, I guess. I mean it was _years_ of…” He wasn’t sure how to explain it to someone who couldn’t have ever experienced it. “…of doctors digging around inside my head. And not just the doctors. On Betazed there’s no privacy anywhere, no _concept_ of privacy. Everyone’s supposed to be an open book. Everyone knows what you’re feeling, every second of every day.”

“No privacy means no lies,” said Hannibal, “and no suffering in silence. A deep understanding from all one’s fellow men. Some would call that a utopia.”

“They can keep it,” said Will. “I hated every second of it. I don’t like it being done to me any more than… well, than most other people like me doing it to them. I left Betazed as soon as they said it was medically advisable, and I don’t plan on going back.”

“And you haven’t had any therapy or training since.”

“Just what I’ve done myself,” Will said. “I’ve kept up with the exercises the doctors taught me, and I’ve picked up a few other things over the years. I do some Vulcan meditation, that helps. But other than that, no.”

Will could read that Hannibal was pleased with his dedication to maintaining his defenses, maybe because it showed he'd be willing to learn. And – there was something else, hard to make out through the constant shifting of his personalities. Impressed?

“I’m impressed,” said Hannibal. _Ok, I guess I’m getting better at reading him._ “Your empathy was so debilitating when it first manifested that it nearly killed you, yet with only a few years of training, you’ve been able to manage on your own all this time.”

“Barely,” Will said. “I’ve had more than a few breakdowns. And I have to live in a warehouse just to keep myself away from other people. Other than that, I guess you could say I’m managing.”

“But you are,” said Hannibal, so sincerely that Will felt himself blushing a bit under his spots. “Think of how far you’ve already come. And think of how much you can see now, even with your walls up and your blinders on. Imagine what you might be able to see if we can bring your powers more thoroughly under your control. You might even discover that you can tolerate the presence of other minds as easily as other Betazoids can. Then…”

Hannibal paused, as if weighing whether to finish his sentence. “Then, perhaps, you would not need to be so alone.”

It hurt to hear, because it didn’t sound possible – _wasn’t_ possible. “I choose to be alone,” Will said. “It’s the only time I get any peace and quiet.”

“No,” said Hannibal, “that isn’t the only reason. You close yourself off from others because you think that they resent and fear you-“

“They _do_ fear me!”

“Yes,” said Hannibal. “But you fear them more.”

Will was starting to remember exactly why he didn’t like therapy. Or therapists, for that matter. “This should be interesting,” he muttered.

“You fear them for how they might reject you, as anyone might. But you also fear them because you think they can erase you, overwrite you. Take over your mind and replace it with their own, if you let them get too close.”

Oh.

Yeah.

Ouch.

“I want to help you learn,” continued Hannibal, “that you are strong enough not to allow that to happen.”

“I'm not,” Will said. “No – I’m not saying that to be self-deprecating. But, look. You said yourself that my empathy was like being joined. You know how _that_ feels. Even if you tried to just be Hannibal Lecter and not Hannibal Fel, you couldn't, could you?”

As he spoke he remembered what he was supposed to be listening for, and he paid particular attention to Hannibal’s mind as he said his name. Or names. He felt nothing new – something still felt off, strange, and yet there was nothing else to it, no clearly suspicious emotion whatsoever.

He almost missed Hannibal’s response to his question. “Not entirely, no,” he was saying. “But for one thing, I have access to the others' thoughts and memories as well as their feelings. That adds another layer of difficulty. And for another thing...” He looked at Will, and there was a pulse of that interest/affection/desire from him again, which Will had to admit to himself he was starting to enjoy. “You can see them as if they are individuals. My selves, I mean. My hosts. As I said the other night, no other Betazoid I've met has had that ability. And neither do I.”

“Wait,” said Will, confused. “You don’t?”

“No. I know which parts of me were once Hannibal Lecter and which were the others – which memories and personality traits. I haven’t forgotten who I am. Or rather, was. But I can no longer distinguish the thoughts and feelings which come from one host or another; they are integrated, to the degree that they may as well be one. This has been my experience within every host.”

It was hard for Will to get used to the way ‘I’ sometimes meant Hannibal, the man he could see sitting in front of him, and sometimes meant Fel, the symbiont inside of him. More often it meant both of them at once, and all the rest of the hosts, too.

“Yet you say you can see them distinctly,” Hannibal continued. “If that is the case, then when it comes to distinguishing one mind from another, you are far more powerful than I am. The combination of Trill and Betazoid may have been a burden to you for much of your life, but it has also given you abilities beyond anything I’ve encountered before.”

“Is that why you offered to help me?” asked Will. “Because I can see you? Not the joined you, but... you. Who you used to be.”

 _What that must mean to him._ Will could barely imagine – to have thought he’d lost his own identity forever, and then to meet someone who was able to see it. But no, he _could_ imagine; it must be like how Will might feel if he could somehow show someone else who he had been before he had manifested, when he had simply been an ordinary, happy child...

“I would be lying if I said it was not a factor,” said Hannibal. “But I truly do want to help you, Will. And I believe that I can.”

“Well then,” said Will, feeling oddly awkward again, “let’s, ah, let’s get to it.” Then he realized – “And what exactly is ‘it,’ anyway? What is it that you want to teach me?”

“A new technique,” said Hannibal, “one that I suspect would not have been taught on Betazed. You said that they taught you how to build walls there – to block off much of what you pick up from others, filter it out until it becomes manageable.”

“That’s right.”

“Your walls have allowed you to survive until now,” he said. “But for you, they may not be the most appropriate defense. Walls for other Betazoids are the equivalent of simply turning the volume of ambient music down. But for you, given the unique way you experience your empathy, it's more like repressing a feeling of your own. No wonder it exhausts you. If your mind will insist on forcing you to feel what others feel, pushing back against those feelings will not be as effective as allowing yourself to feel them.”

 _“Allowing_ myself to feel them?” Will had had no reason to doubt Hannibal’s insight, it had been remarkably accurate so far, but this idea seemed crazy. Dangerous, even. “Didn’t you hear what I told you about going down to the planet? It nearly killed me!”

“Yet it didn’t,” said Hannibal, “and now you are more in control of what you experience from others than you’ve ever been. And you managed all that using exactly the wrong tools. The Betazoids thought they were simply teaching you to drown out noise, but we aren’t meant to repress our emotions, and the emotions you feel from others might as well be your own. What you need are not psychic tools, but psychological ones.

“When we feel unwanted emotions, the proper response is to allow them to pass through us – to acknowledge that we feel them, and then to let them go. Rather than pushing back against them until we collapse, it’s far more effective to let them in, but learn to disregard them. To experience them as what they are: simply feelings, with no power to control our thoughts and actions.”

“…ok,” Will said, “I guess that makes a certain amount of sense. But I should probably tell you now, I still think this sounds like a terrible idea.”

“I appreciate your honesty,” said Hannibal with a smile. “But I do hope I can prove you wrong.” He shifted in his chair a bit, assuming what Will guessed must be his standard professional stance. “Now. The first thing I’d like you to do is to lower your walls just a little, as much as you comfortably can, and turn your focus to me….”

* * *

They went through three hours of Hannibal’s exercises before calling it a night and breaking out the bottle Hannibal had brought with him. The bottle turned out to be wine – from Earth, like Will’s whiskey had been. Will wondered if that had been deliberate, another stab at connection. But maybe it was just a coincidence.

Will was exhausted – bone-tired in a way he hadn’t been since the early days above Betazed, when every lesson had been a struggle – and yet he was happier than he’d been in… well. A while.

They hadn’t quite managed to crack it, not quite. For the most part it had been terribly frustrating. Over and over, Will had lowered his defenses and felt Hannibal’s emotions running roughshod over his own, overwhelming him until he’d finally thrown his walls back up in defeat. But Will was a man who thrived on frustration. It didn’t make him want to give up; it made him want to win. And there had been a couple of times, near the end of the session, when Will had been sure that he had it. Or at least that he was close. Close to letting Hannibal in and yet _not_ letting him in. He would never have believed it was possible.

“So,” said Hannibal, swirling his second glass gently in his hand. Will hadn’t had any wineglasses in his quarters, of course, but luckily the replicator databanks had had the pattern for them. “I assume you’ve told the Captain about me by now?”

 _Told him what_ , Will thought for a moment, before he remembered. “Oh,” he said, “yes, I told him yesterday. He…” Will caught himself before he said that Crawford had already known. “…he’s verifying it with the Commission now. Just as a precaution.”

“Of course,” said Hannibal. “I understand completely.”

Hannibal felt as pleased as Will did  – pleased with Will’s work and pleased with himself, and pleased, now, to be sitting and drinking wine with him. And although Will had been looking into his mind for the past three hours and was still looking now, he hadn’t managed to pick up a single shred of anything suspicious, besides the undefinable issue with his name. There was no wariness in him, no hesitancy, no guilt he was trying to bury. Leaving aside the inherent complication of what he was, he seemed to be a strikingly happy and uncomplicated man. Problem-free.

And Will liked him.

He almost didn’t want to like him. It was much less painful, as he knew from long experience, not to bother with liking anyone at all, except maybe yourself – and even that was more or less optional. Liking people generally led to rejection, one way or another, and Will had decided many years ago that it simply wasn’t worth it to him.

Hannibal had said something, and he’d completely missed it. “Sorry,” Will said, “what was that again?”

“I’d asked if you might be free the same time tomorrow night, for our next session.”

“Tomorrow?” Will asked, and then, without thinking, “Don't you have anything better to do?”

Hannibal was the tiniest bit offended, but mostly he was amused. Will, on the other hand, was mortified.

“Truthfully, I don't,” said Hannibal. “I had expected this voyage to be very dull. There are certainly things I could do to occupy my time, but as I find that I'm enjoying your company, I thought I might as well ask.”

“Normally it wouldn't be a problem,” said Will. “It's just...”

It's just that this is all kind of a lot, and I don't know how to take it just yet, and I don’t know how to feel about the fact that I want to say, yes, come back tomorrow…

“...it’s just that I kind of had something planned already," he said. "Day after?”


	5. Chapter 5

It took three more sessions, forty or fifty failed run-throughs of Hannibal’s exercises, and several more bottles of exotic alcohol before they made any real headway at all.

Over and over again, Will sat in the chair across from Hannibal and pulled all but the most critical of his defenses down, and tried to let Hannibal’s feelings pour in; but his reflex was to flinch away, protect himself from the invasion, put the walls back in place and force Hannibal out. At first it was almost impossible not to. And then, those times when he could make himself relax and let Hannibal flow through him, he could never manage to hold onto himself the way he was supposed to do.

Sometimes his own emotions would get jumbled up with Hannibal’s, and he’d wind up with some unworkable combination of feelings and no idea which of them were really his. It always made him queasy and just a little afraid, not to know who he was; but that fear was an anchor he could grab onto, because he knew it was coming from himself and not from Hannibal.

Other times, he’d lose his grasp on his own emotions completely, and he’d find that he was thinking his own thoughts with nothing but Hannibal’s feelings underneath them. He liked that even less. It wasn’t the emotions themselves that hurt him, it felt fine to be Hannibal – really it was almost annoying, how damned _contented_ Hannibal always was. Even the strange buzzing of the scattered personalities felt good, when it was inside his head. It was as if he were surrounded by close friends who were all laughing at the same joke. But afterward, Will felt guilty and uneasy, like he’d been betraying himself somehow. Cheating on him own subconscious.

And then, midway through the fourth session, something had clicked into place.

For the dozenth time that day he’d opened himself up to Hannibal and felt him trampling over his mind, settling into places where he didn’t belong; but this time, without knowing quite how, Will held onto himself. He knew who he was, what he felt; he knew everything Hannibal felt, too, but it didn’t _matter_ , it couldn’t affect him; Hannibal was flowing over and around him like a stream over a boulder.

He knew who he was. His mind was wide open and he still knew who he was.

He couldn’t maintain it for long. Seconds later he felt their lines begin to blur again, and then, in the few moments before he slammed his walls back in place, he had no idea whose happiness he was feeling – Hannibal’s, or his own, or both of them at once.

* * *

Hannibal lingered in Will’s quarters for longer that night than he had after their other sessions, drinking and talking about nothing in particular, and Will, to his surprise, had no real desire to try to make him go away.

And then, as Hannibal was leaving, he asked, as he had asked every time before, whether Will might be free the following night for their next session.

Will had always deflected those requests, and he deflected again that night. It bothered him, how presumptuous it was of Hannibal to assume he had nothing else planned, even though he obviously didn’t; it bothered him because he could see it for the subtly aggressive move that it was. It would have been more professional for Hannibal to ask Will when he would next be free, rather than putting him in the position of having to accept or reject Hannibal’s invitation.

But Hannibal’s interest was, of course, not purely professional.

And it was all pretty much a moot point, anyway, because Will knew that the next time Hannibal asked him if he would be free the next day, he was going to say yes.

* * *

Will reported back to Jack Crawford twice over the next three weeks. The first time, he told Jack that his suspicions hadn’t been substantiated, and he was fairly sure there was nothing particularly sinister about Hannibal after all. The second time, he told Jack that he was done looking and was going to let the matter drop, and he didn’t want to hear any arguments about it. Jack took this news with the same neutral “hmm” he’d used when Will had come to him with the information about Hannibal in the first place.

It didn’t change anything, really, except that it made Will feel less guilty. He hadn’t liked feeling as if he were spying on Hannibal. As rational as his suspicion had been at first, Will felt more and more as if the specter of it was getting in the way of…

...of what?

He still had no idea how to take Hannibal’s interest in him. It was hard to believe someone like Hannibal, with as many lives as he’d lived, could find anything novel in someone like Will to hold his attention. Much of the interest centered on his abilities, of course, and while he was grateful for the help Hannibal was giving him, it still made him feel a bit like some exotic zoo animal on display. But Hannibal clearly liked him, too; liked talking to him, liked him as a person. The novelty of that was refreshing.

And then there was the _other_ interest. They had known each other for almost a month, and Hannibal still hadn’t acted on it or acknowledged it in any way. There was something unnerving about that. Typically people's insides and outsides lined up on that score- maybe not enough for the average person to read, but Will knew all the correlations. He knew the tiny glances and facial twitches and almost invisible flushes that betrayed desire. But Hannibal was practically porcelain.

Except that he wasn’t, of course, because of course Will knew exactly what Hannibal felt when he looked at him. He had felt it directed at others before, many times, and once or twice he had felt it himself, in a distinctly one-sided way. But he’d never felt it directed at himself, not in anything but the most superficial of ways, not for more than a night or two.

It was dizzying, and it was hard for Will to stay objective in the face of it.

He didn't want to find himself enmeshed with the first person who gave him that kind of attention, to let Hannibal’s feelings influence his own. He knew how susceptible empaths were to codependency; it was one of the reasons Betazoids tended to stick to their own kind.

But being with Hannibal…

It wasn’t just that Will liked being around someone whose emotions were so grounding. It wasn’t just that it was nice to be wanted, although it _was_ undeniably nice. But there was more to it than that. Will’s ability had never been anything but a burden to him, and Hannibal made it feel... not that way. He wasn’t afraid, he wasn’t disgusted. When he called what Will could do a gift, he believed it.

If Will could have been sure that his feelings weren’t just mirroring Hannibal’s, which was entirely possible – after all, he was spending hours almost every night now with Hannibal inside his head, leaving god only knew how much emotional residue behind – if he could have been sure, he would have said that he was starting to want Hannibal, too.

But he wanted to know that he felt it himself, _really_ felt it. And because he knew that he didn’t know, he, like Hannibal, said nothing.

* * *

Their practices grew more advanced as Will grew better at using Hannibal’s techniques. Once he was able to withstand opening his mind for a minute or more at a time without losing track of himself, they moved on to deep reading – pushing through other peoples’ internal defenses to get at the things they felt deep down, far below the surface emotions Will picked up without trying to.

Will hated deep reading. As he’d told Hannibal the night of their first drink, it was a thousand times worse than the usual noise he couldn’t help hearing. In his day-to-day life the volume of other peoples’ ambient thoughts could overwhelm him, and sometimes the mismatch between his thoughts and their feelings could give him a sickening sense of dissonance.

But deep reading _changed_ the way he thought.

Everything we think, they had told him on Betazed, has some origin in something that we feel. Lifelong beliefs and prejudices, odd suppressed personality quirks, long-forgotten traumas, all far below the level of consciousness, are the ingredients that direct everything we think and feel on the surface.

When Will read a person deeply, he didn’t just feel what they felt in the moment. He felt who they _were_ , and he felt it as if he were them.

Practicing this with Hannibal wasn’t easy; he had far more layers to claw through than most, and what Will could feel of him when he went deep was hopelessly confused. There were too many moving parts, and too many of them were at odds with each other in ways that were barely perceptible on the surface. It wasn’t possible to deep-read multiple people at once, except that in a sense that was exactly what Will was doing, and he had no frame of reference for it. He always felt a little shattered, after, and with barely more knowledge of Hannibal’s inner life than he’d had before.

He learned a few things, though. He learned that Hannibal was more passionate than even his surface emotions betrayed, not just about Will but about almost everything; and yet there was something coldly clinical in him, too, that seemed as if it should be at odds with that passion but somehow wasn’t. The only way Will could find to describe it was that Hannibal seemed to love the whole universe so much that he wanted to dissect it, in order to understand why he loved it. He said as much to Hannibal after the session was over, and Hannibal's face broke out in the most disarming smile Will had ever seen on him, and he said, “Beautifully put.”

But as bewildering as Hannibal’s mind was, and as difficult as it was to read, Will could tell he was getting better at it - better than he had ever imagined he could be.

So when Jack called Will’s communicator one night and told him his assistance was needed in the brig, he thought that he was ready.


	6. Chapter 6

Jack was waiting in the corridor outside the turbolift when Will arrived, looking as impassive and controlled as Vulcans always looked. He wasn’t. Will was surprised to see that beneath that calm veneer he was genuinely angry; it was taking an impressive force of will for him not to show it.

He jerked his head in the direction of the brig and strode off toward it, and Will followed. “What’s going on, Jack?”

Jack didn’t bother with a preamble.

“Crewman T’Kel’s body was discovered early this morning, shoved into a Jefferies tube. Shot with a phaser, most likely her own.”

Damn. Oh, damn, _damn_ _it_ _._ It had been a long time since Will had been asked to read a murderer. For a moment, selfishly, he hoped that the real killer was not in the brig after all, that they’d already gotten away.

“Do you know when it happened?” Will asked. _Relax. Just work_ _through_ _the problem._

“No.”

“It was around 0300 hours,” Will said. Off Jack’s glance, he clarified: “I woke up from a nightmare around then, but I couldn’t remember what happened in it.”

“Ah,” Jack said. “It would fit with the timeline. We know it must have happened overnight. She was found after she failed to report to her workstation and her supervisor asked the computer where she was. The computer would have had a difficult time locating her without vital signs, but the killer never removed her comm badge.”

“So whoever did it wasn't Starfleet,” Will said. Removing the comm badge would’ve been the first thing a member of Starfleet would think to do, after committing a murder. He remembered that from his Security days.

“Most likely not,” said Jack. “She was last seen playing cards in Ten Forward with three human passengers, and by all accounts she took them for everything they had.” Jack’s forehead wrinkled almost imperceptibly; Will knew he didn’t approve of gambling aboard his ship. But that was T’Kel – she was always a bit of a Vulcan supremacist, and she’d quietly delighted in showing up non-Vulcans at every opportunity. Will had never liked her all that much, but still, he was sorry to hear she was dead.

“Those passengers are our primary suspects,” Jack was saying, “and we are currently holding all three of them in the brig. We are assuming a revenge motive, not theft; the latinum was found still on her body. The killer did not even rob her.”

“Probably knew it'd get them caught,” said Will. “And the phaser?”

“Found on her body as well, and cleaned. There is no way to identify who last handled it. We have interrogated each suspect, to no avail, and none of them will consent to a mind meld.”

So. Someone unfamiliar with Starfleet, but not totally unfamiliar with crime, given the steps they'd taken to hide the body and the fact that they still hadn't confessed. A petty criminal. Someone impulsive, prone to outbursts of anger. Possibly this was their first kill, but probably not.

“You’re running out of time,” Will said. It wasn’t a question. There was only one reason for Jack to have called him now.

“If we cannot establish probable cause to extend their detention within the next twelve hours, then we will be forced to release them all, yes.”

Of course. Twelve hours… and they were scheduled to dock in the Delta system in a little less than a day. The second they made planetfall, the killer, whoever they were, would be perfectly free to leave the ship at their leisure, and run.

Unless Will could identify them first.

In the absence of other evidence, an empathic deep reading wouldn’t be enough to convict. But it would give Jack the legal justification he needed to keep the killer in custody… and to request a court order for a non-consensual mind meld, which would give him all the evidence he needed.

Will hoped, for the killer’s sake, that they would just confess before it came to that. Being read by a Betazoid didn’t feel like anything at all, but a Vulcan mind meld was… invasive. Brutally so, if the subject tried to resist it. There was a good reason that its use by law enforcement was so strictly controlled.

They were almost at the brig, now, and Will could feel the humans already. They were all some combination of confused and pissed off and afraid and exhausted, and even from hundreds of meters away it made Will’s stomach churn.

It had been almost a year since he'd last been asked to do this. That time it had been a suspect in a simple assault, and his surface reading had picked up nothing but spikes of petulant anger – but underneath, when he’d done the deep reading, Will had discovered the blackest, cruelest depression he’d ever encountered. He had spent the next two days in a pit of self-loathing so deep that he couldn’t even bring himself to cry, and the five days after that had been spent contemplating quitting Starfleet for good.

And that had been nothing compared to what had happened back when he’d worked in the Security detention center, when he’d been white-knuckling his way through a half dozen readings a day for months on end...

But now, he told himself, now he had Hannibal’s training. It might not be so bad, this time. As they stepped through the door of the brig, he tried to make himself believe it.

There they were, one man and two women, packed into a single holding cell behind a high-energy forcefield. Two of them were sitting with their backs to the wall, curled into themselves and hugging their knees; the third, one of the women, was sitting ramrod-straight and staring at the opposite wall. She was the first to notice Will’s eyes, and her fear surged up then, covering her other emotions.

“No,” she said, “ _no,_ get him _out_ of here, this is a fucking violation, I have _rights -”_

“Certainly you do,” said Jack. “Fortunately for us, this is not one of them.”

Will pulled Jack aside – there was no need to be cruel to her, on top of everything else – and said, quietly, “I’ll start with her.” Despite her surface anger, she was the one who felt most afraid of him. The other woman was the truly angry one, and she’d gotten angrier when he’d walked in. He’d take her last. Fear was immediate – in a situation like this one, it was more likely to decrease rather than increase over time – but anger liked to build on itself. And the angrier the other woman got, the less stable her emotional control would become, making it easier for Will to pry into her mind.

* * *

They had set up an interrogation room for Will at the other end of the deck, to minimize the interference from the other prisoners in the brig. Will had Jack bring him there ahead of the first prisoner, who was still being cuffed by Security. He didn’t want to have to walk all the way down the corridor with her right there next to him.

The room was a small one; nothing in it but a table, two chairs, and a forcefield right down the middle, since the guards wouldn’t be in the room with them. Will had learned that prisoners found it far more unsettling if they had to be alone with him, and the more unsettled they were, the more likely they were to let their mental defenses slip.

Jack deactivated the field, and Will sat in the chair on the far side of it before they switched it back on. It was necessary – how else could Security bring the prisoners in and out through the door? - but it still made him feel trapped, as if he were the one being interrogated.

Five more minutes, and they brought her in and sat her down and closed the door. She was trying not to look at him. He knew that whenever she did, she could see her own reflection disturbingly clearly in the featureless black mirrors of his eyes, and it made her even more afraid.

Will always tried to use the fear or anger that his heritage brought out in people, when he did these readings; he played the part of the impassive, terrifying mind invader, against whom there was no hiding and no defense. It was helpful in securing confessions. But more importantly, playing a part made it easier for Will to disguise the very real effect that the readings had on him.

She made herself look at him. “Please don’t,” she said.

 _I’m sorry,_ he thought, but he said nothing, and began to tunnel into her mind.

And it was easy.

Even after the hours upon hours of practice with Hannibal, he hadn’t really expected it to be. He had felt prepared when Jack had called him, but the second he’d felt the prisoners, he had been sure that Hannibal’s methods wouldn’t be enough to protect him. But it was working – he was plunging down through her mind, but he wasn’t becoming her. He was only himself.

For a second he felt almost like laughing, but it would have broken the impression he was trying to cultivate. Instead he focused on what he could find, peeling back the layers, looking for the root of her fear.

She was crying. Will felt a stab of intense guilt, and it took him a moment to realize that it was coming from him and not from her.

Fear, fear on top of fear, and underneath it – no, not guilt. Trauma. Some old, deep trauma, and shame. Overwhelming, and closely guarded, private.

She hadn’t wanted him to see it, that was why she was so afraid of him. But she wasn’t the killer.

Will pulled away from her quickly, left her mind and hid behind his walls again. Even though he hadn’t felt her trauma the way he would have before Hannibal’s training, he was shaken by it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, out loud this time. “I know it wasn’t you. It must have been one of the others. If you can tell us which one, you can walk out that door and go free, right now.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. She wasn’t crying anymore, but Will could see that she felt hollowed out. “Please let me go back to the brig now.”

“Of course,” he said, and the guards came in and took her away.

He wished, then, that the training hadn’t worked, and that he’d been forced to feel what she was feeling after all. It would have made him feel like less of a monster, if he’d had to feel it too.

* * *

He got his wish, with the second one.

They brought him in and sat him down, and Will began the same way as before, and it was just as easy, at first. Plunge in, start looking. But as he clawed his way down, tearing through layers upon layers of the man’s mind – the first ones as flimsy as tissue paper, then canvas, then leather, then steel – each step began to cost him more. He could feel the strain building, the man’s coursing mind beating against his own tight ball of control.

He remembered that he’d never managed to maintain this level of control with Hannibal for more than ten minutes at a time.

He felt his grip on himself begin to weaken.

He tried to focus on the reading, to see if he could manage to find something useful, quickly, before –

And then his composure failed him, and it was as if he'd fallen through a hole in an iced-over lake, the way the man’s fear shot through him.

Oh, oh he was so afraid. Will had been wrong, before – this one was more afraid than the first one had been.

Will pounded at the bottom of the ice, scrabbling for the hole that would bring him back to himself, but it was gone.

The prisoner was edging dangerously close to panicking, and it would take them both, if it happened. Will took a shuddering breath, then two, then three. He moved his hands from the table to his lap, so that the man wouldn’t see them shaking. He still had to finish this.

He searched his feelings – his own feelings, the man’s, there was no longer any real difference. He looked inside for the signs that would demonstrate his own guilt to himself; he imagined killing T’Kel, and he saw that he couldn’t have. It didn’t fit. Nothing the man felt fit with a crime like that, there was no impulsiveness, no buried rage. Just fear, and confusion, and more fear. Prior bad experiences with law enforcement, probably. Or something else, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t him, and Will needed them to take him away, now, because he was about to lose his grip completely.

He forced himself to speak. “Who was it?” he asked, almost managing to keep his voice from breaking. “Tell us and we’ll let you go.”

The prisoner just shook his head, and the guards came in and led him out.

Will felt him walking away, and gradually he faded out, blending with the emotional background noise of the ship, and then Will could finally breathe.

He heard Jack’s voice over the comm. “Graham,” he asked, “are you well enough to continue?” So it was that obvious.

 _Don't make me do it_ , he thought, the other man's fear still throbbing at the base of his skull.

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said. “Then send the last one in.”

* * *

He wasn’t ready when he felt them bringing her to him. He reminded himself that he had never expected to feel ready for something this, before Hannibal.

He began to absorb her emotions long before she appeared, and as he felt himself becoming one with her, the whole place started to feel wrong. Not just the interrogation room, but the entire ship. It wasn’t his home anymore; it was some alien place, he was trapped inside it out here in the blackness between worlds, and it made his skin crawl. It was fear, but a different kind of fear than he’d gotten from the others.

She had to be the one. He hoped it wouldn’t take too long to verify it, because it was not going to be pleasant to be her.

When they brought her in, she didn’t try to look away from him. She just stared at him, her face a blank, but he could feel her hatred. Reflexively, he hated her back.

There was no reason to hesitate. It wouldn’t make it any easier for him. He met her gaze and dove inside it.

And, yes. Yes, he’d been right about her. God, so angry – angry at Will, angry at Starfleet, angry at herself, angry at the whole damned universe. And that was good, he told himself, good, anger was easy. It was malleable. Poke it like a bruise and watch them flinch.

He felt his own anger rising up to match hers, and he didn’t try to stop it. There would have been no point. He had to use it.

“What kind of an idiot,” he said, “plays cards with a Vulcan and actually expects to _win_?”

The anger boiled up through him. There was contempt too, for him, for T’Kel, and a stubborn sense of righteousness, only barely darkened by a trace of guilt.

He could have killed, in this state of mind, which meant that _she_ could have. But it didn’t mean she was guilty. He remembered his Security training – time to move on to step two. Talk about the murder and see how she reacts. If she’s innocent, she’ll be confused, afraid, a different kind of angry. If she’s guilty...

“How'd it feel to kill her?” he asked.

A flash of something through the anger, and now he was almost sure.

“Oh,” he said, “it felt _good_ , didn’t it? Like smashing a bug. Squeezing a zit. It wasn't even about the cards, was it? You just couldn't stand looking at her fucking smug face anymore.”

The more rage he felt, the more sure he was. “You’d never done it before, had you? You’d thought about it, though. It made you feel a little sick, right? But not as sick as you thought it would. Not enough that you wouldn’t do it again.”

She was trying to hide it from him but he was sure, almost sure. If he provoked her just a little more, he’d have her – and besides, he was getting an awful, perverse pleasure from taunting her. Because _she_ would have gotten the same pleasure from taunting someone else.

“You'd love to kill me right now, wouldn't you?” he said, “rip these freak eyes right out of my skull and bloody up my uniform. That’s what this is about, right? You can’t fucking stand us. We all think we’re so much better than you. Just like she did. That’s why you had to kill her.”

And then he could remember how it had felt, that awful thrilling moment when he’d killed. When _she’d_ killed. He had her.

“Congratulations,” he said, “you finally shut her up. But it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. You might have gotten lucky when her back was turned, but we’ve _got_ you now, and she's gonna get a plaque on the wall, and nobody's even going to remember your _name_ –“

Will saw red, just as she did; she lunged at the force field, and he heard it sizzle as she snatched her hand back and clutched it to her chest, rage pounding through her with every heartbeat.

“It’s her,” he said. “Do the mind meld.”

“You fucking worthless bastard _freak,_ ” she hissed, and then Security came in and took her away.

And the rage was still there, and there was nothing left for him to direct it at. Nothing but himself.

He’d let them do this to him _again._

Them, too. Jack, Security, Starfleet. He was furious with them too, he hated them too – it was easier than hating himself, it felt almost good, to hate them so thoroughly. Why _shouldn’t_ he hate them, they knew what this did to him, they _knew_ and they just kept dragging him in here anyway –

He snatched his chair up and hurled it at the space where the force field had been. But they’d turned it off already, and it only bounced against the opposite wall, with no satisfying sizzle.

“Go home, Graham,” he heard Jack say through the comm. “You can write your report on her later. Go home and sleep this off.”

“Go home and fuck yourself, Jack,” he said, and stalked through the interrogation room door. He wished it was the kind that he could slam.

* * *

When he got out of the turbolift, Hannibal was waiting for him.

Fuck.

The first thing he thought was, _y_ _ou were supposed to protect me,_ and then he didn’t know who he was more disgusted with – himself, for being so pathetic as to need protection, or Hannibal, for presuming to be his protector in the first place.

“Not a good time, Hannibal.”

“I know,” he said, “I was worried about you. The computer told me where you were –”

“And why the fuck were you _asking_ it?” They hadn’t been scheduled to meet that night, there was no reason for Hannibal to have been prying into where he was. “Do you just ask it where I am whenever I’m not with _you_? I know you don’t give a shit about my boundaries, but that’s just fucking creepy. Even for you.”

He’d hurt him. _Good,_ he thought. _You deserve it. I had to spend all that time being_ _you, you_ _deserve a little taste of what it feels like to be me._

“So you saw that I was in the brig, and you came to find out what it looked like when I got inside somebody else’s head? Well, it looks like this, asshole.”

He knew this was only someone else’s leftover rage, nothing to do with Hannibal. But he couldn’t resist this opportunity to use it. He was dimly aware that he must have been just a little angry at Hannibal already, for this to feel so good.

“I’m not even your friend, am I?” he said. “I’m your _specimen._ I’m just so fucking fascinating _._ You know, if you actually did want to be my _friend_ , you’d go away and leave me alone, _Doctor Lecter._ ”

Hannibal just looked at him, and Will felt a pulse of something satisfyingly dark and angry from him, something quickly suppressed. “All right,” said Hannibal, and left.

Will stared at the space where Hannibal had been. He was shaking. He wished he’d slapped him; he wished he hadn’t said anything; he wished he’d said something worse.

He wished Hannibal had stayed, and tried to comfort him.

_Asshole._

He wasn’t sure if he meant Hannibal or him. He turned around, still shaking, and headed for his quarters.


	7. Chapter 7

The first thing Will did once he walked into his quarters was get blind stinking drunk. He’d found, back at the start of his Security career, that it dampened and dulled not just his own thoughts and feelings, but also those of the people who got inside his head. Drinking didn’t help with the swirling-together of other peoples’ minds with his – if anything, it made it even worse – but it also made it so that it didn’t matter.

He drank until he couldn’t feel the prisoner anymore. It took him a while, even as far away from her as he was, because now she was out of her mind with rage. And because now he was attuned to her, dialed to her frequency like an old-time radio.

Then, because until he fell asleep he wouldn’t have to wake up again and deal with the consequences of what he had said, he put on the loudest, fastest, screamingest music he could find in his files. It kept him awake for an hour or two, wasted and distracted enough that he almost managed to forget that he hated everyone and everything on the miserable godforsaken ship, including himself.

And then, despite his best efforts, he finally fell asleep anyway.

* * *

When he woke up, he felt like shit for more reasons than just his hangover. He fumbled in his bedside table drawer for a hypospray and applied it to his neck, gave the painkiller a moment to cut the hangover down from unbearable to merely hideous. Then he had the replicator make him something full of salt and grease, along with a huge black coffee. And after that, there was finally nothing left to distract him from the shame. He regretted nearly everything he’d said and thought last night.

But… even if he’d said it all and thought it all in the worst possible ways, none of it had really been untrue. He _did_ hate that Jack had made him go through this again, and he _did_ hate that he had allowed it again, and he _did_ hate the way Hannibal sometimes looked at him like he was a sample in a petri dish. But he didn’t think he hated the prisoner, not anymore; and he didn’t hate Hannibal, either.

He couldn’t regret the things he’d said to him, not really. One way or another, he would have eventually said them anyway. But he regretted letting him leave. He would have stayed, if Will had asked him – even after Will had yelled at him and insulted him to his face, he would have stayed.

Will wasn’t sure if he would even have wanted him there, not in the state he’d been in. But even if he hadn’t wanted him there, Hannibal would have made it better if Will had let him stay. Will knew, somehow, that he would have made it better, and it scared him a little. He shouldn’t be depending on this man he still barely knew, this man who was going to be gone from his life in less than two months. Will had many weaknesses, and he knew them all intimately; over-reliance on other people had never been one of them. He had become perversely proud of his loneliness. It meant that he was self-sufficient.

It meant that someday, if it all became too much, he could finally check out completely and go set up a farmstead on some isolated planet far from the shipping lanes, and never see or feel a single living soul again for the rest of his life. He had always quietly assumed that he would end up that way, and he had come to accept it.

Wanting Hannibal’s comfort felt like weakness. And so, even though he suddenly, desperately wanted to, Will didn’t call him.

* * *

He came anyway, late in the afternoon.

Will felt him coming from all the way outside of the cargo bay. He wasn’t his usual self. His minds, which usually worked in such close concert that only a talent like Will's could see any daylight between them, were all out of sync. Some of them were still a little angry with him, some of them were worried about him, some, infuriatingly, were still just curious. And they each seemed to be constantly shifting what they felt, flickering and guttering in response to the others like candle flames in a drafty room. It must have been overwhelming.

He wasn’t used to feeling that way, Will could see that at a glance. Most days Hannibal was as controlled as any Vulcan, at least on the surface. Now he wasn’t just distressed, he was distressed at his own distress, angry at himself for feeling the things he was feeling.

Will could relate.

And as guilty as he felt, some tiny part of Will was pleased to have been able to knock him so off-balance.

He heard the chime that told him Hannibal was at the door. “Come in,” he said, and the computer opened the door to let Hannibal inside. Will went as far as sitting up, but he didn’t move from the bed to meet him. Standing up was a step toward normalcy that he didn’t yet feel ready to take.

Hannibal didn’t look distressed. Probably nobody but Will would ever have known that anything was wrong. He was carrying a bottle in his hand. Scotch.

“That looks real,” Will said. “Not from the replicator. Where’d you get it?”

“Planetside,” said Hannibal. “We entered orbit twelve hours ago, and I thought I would leave the ship and see the sights, and… leave you to your own devices. I happened to see this and thought you might like it.”

It was, in the grand scheme of things, a small gesture. It was also the nicest thing that anyone had done for Will in years, and if he let himself think about that for too long, he was definitely going to cry.

To distract himself, Will said, “She’s gone, isn’t she – the prisoner? I can’t feel her anymore. Except the… residue.”

“Yes. She has been turned over to the Federation authorities.”

“Oh.”

From the moment he’d set eyes on her, Will had hated her, had almost been forced to hate her. Now that she was gone, he could finally pity her. He had only had to be her for a few hours. She would have to be herself for the rest of her life.

Hannibal set the bottle on a table, then carried a chair over to the bed and sat down next to Will. Apparently there was going to be a conversation.

“I wanted you to know,” said Hannibal, “that I only asked the computer where you were last night because I heard about the murder, and I thought Jack might have taken you. Evidently I was right.”

It didn’t feel like a lie. God. Will felt like the biggest asshole in a hundred thousand miles. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“But you were right,” Hannibal said. “I did want to see what you would be like, after. I was curious. I should have realized how that would make you feel.”

Like a specimen. It still made Will angry, to know that some part of Hannibal saw him that way, but mostly he was just sorry – sorry, and sad, and tired. “I get it,” he said. “I know I’m… of interest. Scientifically. But I don’t like being thought of like that.”

“I haven't been behaving toward you quite like a friend should behave, have I?” said Hannibal.

Will didn’t know whether it was the tone of Hannibal’s voice or the shape of his thoughts that made him reply, “You say that like you’re not sure how a friend should behave.”

That won Will the tiniest hint of a smile from Hannibal. “You’re not far wrong,” he said. “My social circles tend to be composed of acquaintances and colleagues. I’ve known very few people who I would call friends. I suppose I’m not very skilled at making them.”

“No offense,” said Will, “but shouldn't you have figured that out by your age?”

A real smile, now. Will was glad he’d made him smile instead of pissing him off again. “As it turns out,” said Hannibal, “the conventional wisdom that it’s more difficult to make friends as you get older holds true even if you live for centuries. Especially so, in some ways. The effort required for friendship often feels wasted when one knows that the object of one’s friendship will soon die. I find it suits me better, with most people, to be friendly rather than a friend.”

“But not with me,” Will said, because if they _had_ to talk about this then they were going to actually _talk about it_.

“No,” Hannibal said. “Not with you. And now I find that the scripts I typically use when I meet someone new are of little use to me.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better,” said Will, “I don't know how to act with you, either. Can you pour us a couple of Scotches?”

Hannibal did, and they drank them in silence. But it was comfortable, not awkward, and Will had the benefit of knowing for a fact that it was comfortable for both of them. Hannibal’s anxiety was melting away, now that he could see that Will wasn’t still angry with him; and Will’s was melting, too, because oddly enough it seemed like he hadn’t managed to ruin everything. Not yet.

He only let himself have the one drink before he said, “I want to tell you something. To help you understand why I didn’t want to see you. I didn’t ever tell you about why I got kicked out of Security.”

“No,” said Hannibal, “I don’t believe you did.”

“It was horrible,” Will said. “I mean, every day was horrible, after my first transfer. See, I was so good that after a few months of service they pulled me off the ship I was serving on and sent me to a detention ship. High-level prisoners. But I should never have let them send me there. I couldn’t even live on the ship, I had to live in a shuttle. Any closer and I couldn’t sleep. And then every day it was just one interrogation after another. I did that for months – six people a day, sometimes. And all of them had done terrible things. As bad as that woman last night or worse. But I thought I was coping.”

Coping. He wished he had asked for that second Scotch after all.

“I thought I was, but I wasn’t. I was just getting used to it. But that’s not… what you want to get used to. And then one day I just...”

He trailed off. He hadn’t told anyone this story since the month after it had happened. When he’d found himself sitting on the prisoners’ side of the interrogation table.

He glanced up, startled, when he felt Hannibal’s hand on his arm. “You don’t have to tell me,” said Hannibal, “unless you want to.”

Will noticed that Hannibal had refilled his glass, without his even noticing. He decided that it might be ok for him to cry, just a little. And that it might be ok to go ahead and drink the second drink, because, well, fuck it.

He drank half of it down and said, “I tried to kill my crewmate.” It was stranger than he thought it would be, to say it. Like it had happened to somebody else. In a way, of course, it had – the man Will had been on that station was not the man he was now. “It was after an interrogation, and I’d picked up all this… not anger, like last night. Contempt. Just this total contempt, for everything. Everyone. Loathing. And I saw her coming down the corridor and, I’d never really _liked_ her, but in that moment it was like… like, just the fact that she breathed the same air as me was the most offensive thing I could imagine. I couldn’t tolerate it. And the only thing that made sense to me was to... stop it. End her. So I attacked her. I tried to beat her to death. They only just pulled me off of her in time.”

_And._

He finished his drink. “And I liked it,” he said. “I liked hurting her. That’s the part I really can’t stand to think about. But that’s how it works. You soak it all in, and eventually you can’t hold any more of it, and it just comes back out. Like squeezing a sponge. I’d probably be in prison if word hadn’t gotten out to a Betazoid general who was high up in Security. She raised hell for me. Said somebody as unstable as me should never have been given that assignment in the first place. Said it would never happen again, if they kept me away from… that kind of thing.”

Will felt a rush of fondness from Hannibal that he wasn’t prepared for. Sadness, too. “That was a terrible abuse of your gift,” he said. “I’m sorry that was done to you.”

Will shook his head. “I should have said something months before it got to that point,” he said. “I knew it was getting to me. But I was saving lives.”

“You save lives now,” Hannibal said. “By ensuring that the warp core doesn't breach and launch us all into space.”

Will surprised himself by laughing. “You really know how to cheer a guy up,” he said.

“Is that why you allow Captain Crawford to continue to use you this way?” asked Hannibal. “So that you can continue to save lives?”

“I don't know,” said Will. “I don't know why I let him. Except, if it isn't me, then who else? She would have gotten away. I just… I wish you hadn’t seen me that way.”

“I don’t believe,” said Hannibal, “that there is anything you could do or say to lower my opinion of you, Will.”

And then Will, who had been so focused on his own surging feelings that he hadn’t looked closely at Hannibal’s in a while, abruptly noticed something that Hannibal himself had yet to fully realize.

 _Oh, oh god,_ thought Will. _He’s in love with me._

It was too much. Too much, too soon, they had only just begun to get to know each other, how could Hannibal love him after so little time? And besides, he was leaving, he was leaving in less than two months, nothing could come of this, it was only going to end, and soon.

And Will still didn’t know how he felt himself; the things he’d said with the prisoner in his head were mostly still perfectly true.

But he didn't care.

He'd never felt a love this uncomplicated. Really no one had loved him at all since his father and his father's crew, and their love was so mixed up with guilt and pity that it was more painful than simple ambivalence.

And just then, Will needed it.

“I think might fall asleep again,” he said. “But will you stay until I do?”

“Of course,” said Hannibal.

Will lay back down, and after a moment, Hannibal offered Will his hand, and he took it.

He didn’t even try to hold onto himself. He opened his mind up to Hannibal, and let himself drown. He let Hannibal’s love for him wash the last of the anger and fear from his mind. And he tried not to let himself worry about what it meant that he needed it.


	8. Chapter 8

Two days after a deep reading, Will should have been next to useless. As it was, when he woke up the morning after his talk with Hannibal, he was only half-useless; he even mustered up the energy to write up his report on the interrogation and send it to Jack, along with a note saying he’d be taking two weeks off after this one.

It was more than he’d ever taken before, and usually he at least pretended to _ask_ Jack for the time, rather than telling him. Partly it was a pointed statement – _this_ _is bad for me, and it_ _is_ _n’t getting any easier._

But partly, it was just that Will was beginning to be acutely aware that Hannibal was leaving, and he wanted to spend as much time with him as he could, before he was gone.

It embarrassed him to admit it, even to himself. But it was pointless to pretend now. There had been a change since the day after the interrogation, a certain dropping of pretenses. After Will sent the letter to Jack, he called Hannibal; and in the following two weeks they spent more of their waking hours together than apart, enough that it was noticed even by the gossip-averse Vulcans.

And when they were apart, Will could still feel him. He was so attuned to him now that he had a vague awareness of his presence almost everywhere he went on the ship; he could pick him out of the buzz of the crowd like a familiar face.

But they never discussed the fact that Hannibal would be gone in five or six weeks. And they never discussed the thing that Will had glimpsed in Hannibal’s mind, that first day after their fight.

Hannibal still didn't know. Not quite. He knew, as he had known from the first day they'd met, that he _wanted_ Will, though the wanting was even less straightforward now than it had been then. Will could no longer tell how much of Hannibal’s desire was physical and how much was mental and how much was emotional, which meant that Hannibal certainly couldn’t tell either. But the fact of that confused desire was all that he knew – that, and the fact that whenever he looked at or thought about Will, he was more than typically happy.

Will had been a student of humanoid emotion for most of his life, and he knew how this went. It often took ages for conscious thought to catch up with subconscious feeling. But when it did – when people finally realized just what it was that they felt – then the feeling exploded. With that conscious foundation to build on, it bloomed and multiplied and cemented itself in the person’s mind. It became _real._

It was early enough that it still might not happen. If Will let this be, if he decided to say nothing, then Hannibal might never even realize it. He might go on with his life – his lives – and remember Will only as a closer-than-usual friend.

And then Will could remember Hannibal that way, too.

It would probably be easier on both of them.

* * *

One day, Will decided to show Hannibal his stream.

It was based on a place on Trill that he’d visited with his dad a few times, back when he was a boy. Though he’d grown up in starships and felt few ties to terrestrial places, he had always remembered that stream fondly, and now he could never go back there. Even with everything he’d learned, it was still painful for him to spend more than a few days on heavily populated planets, and those few days were not relaxing.

So he’d bought a sandbox-style holodeck program based on Trill wildlife and geology, and he’d made himself a few square acres of stream and parkland. It wasn’t a perfect imitation – programs like that could never get the feel of the air quite right, or the smell of water – and besides, he could still hear the minds of the Chesapeake’s crew while he was inside the holodeck, breaking the illusion that he was alone in the countryside. But it was close enough. He visited when he needed to escape his life for a while. It reminded him of when he used to be normal.

“I try not to run this program that often,” Will said. He and Hannibal were sitting on the bank of the stream, watching the water roll by. Hannibal was resting his back against a tree, while Will lay on his back and watched the clouds; he’d always been fascinated by weather, having only occasionally experienced it. “Maybe once or twice a month. It feels good to be here, but I think if I came here too much it would just make me sad.”

“It’s healthy that you try not to dwell on the past,” said Hannibal. “Or on what might have been. You should be proud of the things you’ve accomplished in this life, without comparing it to some imaginary other life.”

“I am,” Will said. “Mostly. I’m proud that I’ve survived this long. And I’m proud of my career – it’s something I did on my own, the engineering. I'm good at it, and I take it seriously. That's why - well. Anybody else with my handicap would never have been promoted this many times. As it is, I can’t fulfill all the duties of my office. I'm pretty useless in combat situations.”

“Even on this ship?”

“Even on this ship. I think the Vulcans find it a bit embarrassing, actually. Don't want to admit they're scared, and I’m living proof they are.” Will paused. He didn’t want to sound too morbid, but somehow he wanted Hannibal to know the rest. “And... then, whenever somebody dies, it takes me a little while to even function again. That’s even harder on everybody else than it is on me, to have to see that. Nobody wants me around during a battle.”

Hannibal asked, “You've felt people die?”

“Yeah. A few times. They were far away, so it wasn't... normally I'd never have been able to read them from that far away. I can't imagine what it's like up close.”

Will felt a strange surge of affection from Hannibal then, and for a moment he couldn’t make any sense of it at all. But then, Hannibal said, “It's like when a loud sound stops and you can hear the ringing in your ears. Only it isn't a sound, it's everything. Everything they were.”

Will looked over at Hannibal. He was gazing off into the distance, but he wasn’t sad – he had a strange little smile on his face.

“You forget,” he said. “I have died many times. The symbiont is only removed and transplanted after the previous host is dead. But it isn’t quite the same as truly dying, of course. I always knew that I’d come back.” He turned to Will. “You've wondered what it must be like, haven’t you? To die, and finally feel nothing at all?”

Will hesitated. “I’m not suicidal.”

“I know.”

“Then… yes,” said Will. “I’ve wondered that. Have _you_ wondered what it would be like to die for real?”

“Why waste my time wondering?” said Hannibal, still smiling. “I’ll find out eventually.”

Will laughed. “This is weird, right? I mean, it’s a weird thing to… be pleased we have in common. Knowing what it’s like to die. Or almost knowing.”

“Perhaps,” said Hannibal. “But I have no complaints.”

They went a minute or two without speaking, then – but Will could feel a question beginning to form in Hannibal’s mind. He turned his attention back to the clouds and waited to hear what it would be. Hannibal’s curiosity about him and his condition had only grown, even after the verbal thrashing Will had given him; but somehow Will found himself minding it less, these days.

“How does it make you feel,” Hannibal finally asked, “to know what it’s like to die, when you have to know what it’s like to kill?”

Will didn’t answer for what felt like a long time.

“Afraid,” he said.

“Of them? The killers, the fact that some of them still walk free?”

“No,” said Will. “It makes me afraid because when I’m them, they’re _right._ As far as they're concerned, they're right. Everyone is. Every single person feels justified in doing the things that they do.” He searched for a way to say the next part of what he had to say without coming across as sociopathic. “And when you know for a fact that everyone feels justified, it makes the whole concept of right and wrong feel… arbitrary. Like a lie we all agree to tell ourselves. I mean, I still know what _I_ believe, and I still believe it, but I can’t pretend it’s more legitimate than what anybody else believes. Not anymore. But you must feel that, right? I mean, your hosts must have all had different ideas about what was right and what was wrong.”

“Yes,” said Hannibal. “And I understand what you mean. It isn’t easy to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at once.”

“You asked me a while ago why I joined Starfleet,” Will said. “That’s why, really. Because if there’s no such thing as a universal moral code, then somebody had to just draw a line in the sand and say, ok, we have to agree to pretend that there is. Agree on a definition of right and wrong, and try to make sure everybody follows it. That’s what the Federation does.”

“Why?” asked Hannibal. “Why did that line have to be drawn?”

“Because we can’t afford _not_ to agree,” Will said. “We can’t afford not to work together. If we didn’t... if the Federation didn’t exist, then the Borg or the Dominion or god knows what else would be here tomorrow. But if we can agree on some shared values, even if they’re just white lies, then we can work together to keep ourselves safe.”

“Regardless of whether those values are right?”

“I think they are,” said Will. “Well. Most of them. Usually. But it doesn’t really matter if I think they are or not. Agreeing on them is just what we have to do in order to survive. Survival's 'right,' isn't it?”

Hannibal smiled. “I certainly think so,” he said.

* * *

After Will’s medical leave expired and he went back to work, Hannibal and Will still saw each other every evening. They made a point of it, even if Will was exhausted from crawling around in Jeffries tubes all day, or if Hannibal was absorbed in a piece of writing or composition. Some nights they didn’t even talk much, they just sat together in silence and read, or listened to music.

Cargo Bay Three was emptying out, now, as the Chesapeake neared the end of her mission. When Hannibal left Will’s quarters at the end of their nights together, Will watched him walk away across the cargo bay floor rather than over the catwalk.

He had begun to wonder whether, some night, he was going to ask Hannibal to stay.

Hannibal would arrive at his destination in less than a month, and he was contracted to stay there for a full year. And after that… well, his life was elsewhere. Not on this ship. And this ship was Will’s home. Whatever this thing between the two of them was, it couldn’t continue after this mission. Will had told himself over and over again that this was all the more reason not to let it escalate further.

Increasingly, he wasn’t so sure.

He didn't have to force himself to remember the warnings he'd been given about entering into romantic relationships as a Betazoid. They were at the forefront of his mind whenever he looked at Hannibal now. He wasn't even sure that the warnings were wrong. But what did it matter if they were right? So he'd enmesh himself too closely with a man he barely knew, who'd probably leave emotional devastation behind him when he left.

Maybe it would be worth it, because he had begun to realize he'd be devastated when Hannibal left even if he never said a word to him about it.

Why should he care if he was mirroring Hannibal – if his feelings for Hannibal were being influenced by Hannibal’s feelings for him? It _felt_ real.

He could have sat down with himself and tried to pick apart what he felt and figure out exactly how much of it was coming from him. But he didn't want to.

He had long since accepted that he'd never get to feel this way. And while the cautious part of him still clung to that as truth, the rest of him couldn't really remember what was supposed to be so bad about letting yourself fall.

If he shattered into a million pieces afterward, he could always just sweep the pieces up into a dustpan and glue then back in place again. It wasn't like he hadn't done it before.

* * *

Will made up his mind an hour before the next time he saw him. In that hour he thought of all kinds of things to say – sweet things, practical things, defensive things. Explanations, questions. Warnings.

When he felt Hannibal approaching his quarters, he realized that he had wasted his time, because suddenly he couldn’t remember any of it. All of the words he had thought of had fled.

Instead, when he met Hannibal at the door, all he could do was look at him for a long moment. Then he just said, “You’re leaving.”

Hannibal couldn’t have missed the way that the words caught in his throat.

“Yes,” he said.

Will took Hannibal’s hand and pulled him gently through the door, and it slid shut with a click that echoed in the silence of the room. Then Will stepped in close to Hannibal and kissed him.

Something bloomed in Hannibal.

Just Hannibal, at first, and then Will felt it rush across his minds like a fire in dry tinder, overwhelming him. Will had never felt anything like it, never, it was like a kaleidoscope of wanting pointed at himself.

Hannibal laughed a little when Will pulled away to catch his breath and to look into Hannibal’s eyes. “I should have known,” said Hannibal, “I should have known you wouldn't let me get away with wanting you and saying nothing.”

Will felt Hannibal’s hand come to rest at his waist, and he felt the touch between them like a brand, and he had no idea whose feeling that was.

He said, “Aren't you done being surprised by the things I can see?”

“Never,” said Hannibal.

He had felt Hannibal’s want for him before, but that was nothing compared to what he felt now, he could feel it swirling all around him like a storm. He could have walled it out, he could have held himself separate from it, like Hannibal had taught him. Instead he pulled Hannibal close again and let his mind flow through him, washing the last of his doubts away, and then he pulled him toward the bed.

And as that flood of feeling overwhelmed the last of the barriers between them, Will thought that he heard Hannibal say his name.

But Hannibal’s mouth was pressed against his neck, and Will knew that he hadn’t spoken.

_Will_

Oh, thought Will, oh my god -

_yes, oh, perfect, Will_

\- god, I can _hear_ him -

For the first time in his life, another person’s thoughts were echoing inside Will’s mind.

He knew what it meant. He would worry about it later. Right now, the only thing he cared about was finding out how many other words he could wring out of Hannibal’s mind with his mouth and his hands. He pushed Hannibal onto the bed, and Hannibal pulled him down with him; and it felt to Will almost as if a dozen pairs of hands were pulling at him, and a dozen different voices were whispering his name.

* * *

Will stayed awake long after Hannibal fell asleep, tracing the line of spots that ran down his body with his eyes, and marveling at what he could hear. He was trying to keep out of Hannibal’s mind as best he could, it was only fair; but even though he was trying to look away, Will could see what looked like little firefly flashes of himself in Hannibal’s mind. Hannibal was dreaming about him.

Telepathy. At _Will’s_  age. It wasn’t unheard of by any means, but Will had never had any expectation that it would happen to him. He had never been close enough to anyone to create the proper conditions for it.

Even the weakest empaths sometimes developed shaky telepathic links with people they were particularly attuned to. It happened often with parents and children, or between siblings.

And then, sometimes it happened when you were falling in love.

He couldn’t believe he had waited this long, he couldn’t believe he had let so many ridiculous excuses keep him from this. And he decided, as he watched Hannibal’s sleeping form rise and fall with his breathing, that he was _not_ going to let this end when Hannibal left. He would wait however long he needed to wait, make whatever sacrifices he needed to make, because this was not something that he was willing to throw away. Not this, not anymore.

Will fell asleep in Hannibal’s arms.

That night, he had terrible dreams.


	9. Chapter 9

Will was gouging out a woman’s eyes.

He could feel wet heat on his fingertips, the hard line of her eye sockets, twitching muscle. She screamed and writhed, trying to fight him, but he knew she would lose. She had already lost, before she had even known she was playing the game. Blood welled from the wounds and streaked down her face like tears. It was a striking image. He would remember it.

He wasn’t trying to kill her, not yet. He had all the time in the world to kill her.

He felt nothing from her. The panic and pain that should have been shrieking across his mind weren’t there, she was completely blank, it was as if she were already dead. But she couldn’t be, she was still screaming, clawing at him with sharp nails, it didn’t make sense, what was she, why couldn’t he _feel_ her—

—and then he was awake, gasping and sweating, and for a terrified moment in the dark of his quarters he thought he was the one who had been blinded. He tried to get control of his breathing, still only half-sure that it hadn’t been real.

He wasn’t alone. He had another moment of panic before he remembered- Hannibal. Awake, just barely, and giving off little pulses of concern. Will held onto that, to the reality of Hannibal next to him, an anchor. _It was just a dream, you know where you are, you_ _know you_ _didn’t do it…_

“Will?”

 _Right. Right, he’s awake, I should probably say something._ Will swallowed, tested out his voice: “Oh, um. Bad dream.”

He felt Hannibal’s hand come to rest on his arm. He could see him now that his eyes had adjusted, the features of his face just visible in the dark. “Are you all right?”

Will had had hundreds of nightmares since manifesting, but he could count on two hands the number of times someone had asked him if he was all right. _How depressing_ , he thought. He smiled to himself in the dark.

“It happens,” he said. “I’m ok. Let’s just go back to sleep.”

* * *

He kept smiling to himself all through breakfast that next morning. He felt faintly ridiculous, but he was enjoying the feeling. He usually had to be so serious.

He was also enjoying the snatches of thought that he could pick up from Hannibal. Just snatches – the thoughts were fuzzier, now, less intense now that they weren’t making love. And he couldn’t interpret everything. It took years of practice for ordinary telepaths to perfect their craft, and Will had no innate talent for it, as he did with his empathy. Only the fully formed thoughts sounded anything like words. Below that there were flashes, brief images, impressions; some thoughts would float up to the level of consciousness and then sink back down again. And everything he thought was twined around his emotions in the most intricate ways.

Will had often wondered what telepathy must be like. It was much more beautiful than he'd imagined.

Right now, along with Hannibal’s sleepy pleasure at being here in Will's quarters, Will could see snatches of images. Mostly he just saw the things that Hannibal was seeing. The room, the table, the plates, but with the tiniest distortions compared to what Will saw. And then, when Hannibal looked at Will, Will would sometimes see flashes of himself last night, which made him blush extravagantly; and along with that, there was a sentiment something along the lines of 'mine'.

 _Mine._ Will felt like he was twenty again. “You know,” he said, “it’s been years since I’ve done this.”

Will heard Hannibal’s thoughts an instant before he spoke: _I_ _never would_ _have guessed, from the way you worked me over_ “Oh?”

Will grinned and looked down at his plate. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Hannibal’s face when he told him what he could hear now. “Yeah,” he said. “Not for lack of… well. When I was younger I got around. Everybody wants to try sex with an empath, you know, and I always had fun.” It was the one time when Will’s permeable boundaries had always felt like a blessing– he always knew exactly how to make his partners feel good, and it made _him_ feel good, too. “But most people… they’re happy to have that kind of connection in bed, but after, it’s too much. Too intense. They don’t want to stick around and be that vulnerable all the time. They just want to have fun and then take off. And...” _And the pleasure I got out of fucking them started to be outweighed by the pain after, when they left._ “...I just got tired of it.”

“Well,” said Hannibal, _I’ll never leave you_ “I’m not taking off.”

Will reached across the table, and squeezed Hannibal’s hand.

They lingered over the food until it was almost time for Will to leave. He still had work, although it had never felt less important.

Could he really leave Starfleet, to be with Hannibal? Hell, _should_ he? He was a grown man, and he knew better than most people how feelings could change over time. This was his whole life, and throwing it away was not a decision he could make lightly.

But suddenly, it was a decision he could imagine making. Maybe.

Well, there was no need to rush it. That month until Hannibal arrived at his teaching post no longer felt like all the time they had left. It felt like it could be a beginning.

They carried the empty dishes back over to the replicator and put them in, and watched them shimmer and vanish into nothing. And then Hannibal reached out to brush Will’s jaw with his fingertips and leaned in to kiss him again, almost chastely this time, for no other reason than the fact that they were standing beside each other and it felt like the thing to do.

He should tell him, before he got dressed and left for work. It wouldn’t be fair to him otherwise.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” he said. “Last night...” He blushed again. He was doing a lot of blushing today. His spots must be practically glowing, and he wondered if Hannibal could feel the heat of his neck under his fingertips. For some reason, briefly, the thought reminded him of some dream he must have had.

Will took a breath. Hannibal knew enough about Betazoid physiology to know what this would mean. What it would mean about how Will felt. “Last night, I… heard you. I heard your thoughts. I can still hear them now.”

Something flicked across Will's new, strange field of mental vision before he could comprehend it.

Then Hannibal’s mind slammed shut like an airlock door.

A moment passed.

“Thank you for telling me,” Hannibal said. He was feeling concern, intense concern. Even fear.

“Are you ok?” Will asked. “I didn't mean to...”

There was a long pause. Hannibal must have been thinking of what to say, but Will could no longer hear it. Only its absence. “It isn’t that I want to shut you out,” he finally said. “I just need time.”

Will understood. He did. He'd left Betazed exactly because he hated having his mind read by everyone he met; he understood how uncomfortable it could be to have your private thoughts on display.

But this wasn’t that. It wasn’t the same. Will wasn’t just some stranger to Hannibal, this wasn’t just standard telepathy. This was special. Beautiful. Or it should be.

“You don’t have to be afraid that… Hannibal, you told me there was nothing I could say to lower your opinion of me. That's how I feel too. I'll try to tune it all out if that's what you want, but… but I...”

Hannibal didn’t reply. With every word Will said he was growing more worried and locking himself down more tightly, and his agitation was pulsing through Will’s mind and mixing with his own.

Will knew he should just let it be. Give him time, like he’d said.

But...

But he'd opened himself up to Hannibal so completely. He had let him in, and Hannibal had _pushed_ him to do it. Like Will had said when they’d fought- Hannibal had practically stormed into Will’s life and made himself at home, he had persuaded him to give up all his secrets one by one, and despite his reservations Will had done it, _happily_ , because he had come to trust Hannibal.

And had assumed that Hannibal returned that trust.

He had torn down every one of his carefully constructed barriers for this man, and now-

_Damn it. Damn it, you were the one who fell in love with me first, you asshole!_

“What is this about, really?” he asked. “Can’t you just _tell_ me?”

Hannibal still didn’t say a word.

But he didn’t have to.

He had extraordinary mental control, but it wasn't perfect. The more he tried to repress, the more things shot to the surface unbidden. It was confused and jumbled, and Will had no experience at all in reading thoughts. But there was one thing he could see.

Hannibal was hiding something from him, something he desperately wanted him not to discover.

Hannibal had been _lying_ to him.

It must have shown in Will’s face, because Hannibal tried to pull away from him, toward the door. Will grabbed him by the arm, hard, and he felt a little throb of pain from him; he must have hurt him.

Will wasn’t sure whether it was anger or confusion that was driving him. But he had to know.

“You can't lie to me, Hannibal,” he said. “Not _me._ ”

Hannibal stopped trying to pull his arm away from him then. He turned to look at Will. Those amber eyes... there was a pulse of sadness, maybe resignation.

“Will,” he said. “ _D_ _on't.”_

Will tightened his grip on Hannibal’s arm, and just as he’d done countless times before, he plunged deep into Hannibal’s mind.

It was so different now that it was too much to process at first. For the first few seconds it made no sense at all. A chaos of thoughts, memory, subconscious, all swirled together with the feelings that had always been there. And even the feelings alone were almost too intense to focus on directly- the sadness had an edge of distress to it now, even panic.

Will strained to separate Hannibal’s thoughts and feelings from his own, just like Hannibal had taught him. And then he looked.

He was not prepared for the things he saw.

* * *

He must have backed away, but he couldn’t remember doing it. He felt cold, he was trembling, he knew he should be afraid but he was almost too confused for fear. His mind spun in useless circles.

“You're not Hannibal.”

Even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t true. He knew the texture of Hannibal's mind better than he had ever known anyone's. This _was_ Hannibal.

 _This_ was Hannibal.

He knew he wasn’t dreaming but he had to be, he _had_ to, because it was not possible that Hannibal had done any of the things that Will had just seen him do.

This was… he had to… his hand flew to his comm badge, but his fingers only brushed the bare skin of his chest. The comm badge was still on the floor with his clothes.

And his phaser-

The nightstand.

He dove for it, but Hannibal was faster, just barely; he grabbed Will by the waist and slammed his body against the bulkhead.

Faster. Stronger, too. And now he had the phaser, and he was aiming it directly at Will’s chest. There was sadness, still. Regret. And not a trace of guilt. Will could barely remember how to breathe.

Hannibal said, “I’d hoped that we would have more time together.”

Before Will could even begin to process that, Hannibal fired, and Will hit the floor.

The phaser must have been set to low stun, because he was still conscious, barely. But he couldn’t move, his limbs felt as if they weighed a thousand pounds. He couldn’t think straight.

What was happening? Where was Hannibal? He was… what was he doing, he was doing something with the replicator… if Will could just move, he could crawl to the comm badge, except that it might not do much good, because he wasn’t really sure if he could speak.

He felt Hannibal press something against his neck.

 _Oh, n_ _o,_ _no_ _-_ Will tried to twist away but he could still barely move, and then he heard the hiss of the hypospray.

And then he could see Hannibal, crouching down beside him. He was holding Will’s face again and watching his eyes, with a clinical look that was somehow so much worse than everything else Will had just seen.

And again, Will heard: _Mine._

Something was wrong, really wrong. He should have been coming out of stun by now. Instead he was getting weaker, he felt almost liquid, spilling. Slipping.

“I’ll see you soon,” said Hannibal.

Maybe it wasn’t real after all. Of course it wasn’t. How could it be?

Hannibal stood up. “Computer!” he said.

_Oh. Right. Shit. I could’ve just done that._

“We need Medical in Will’s quarters, urgently.” He sounded so normal. “I think we’ve been poisoned.”

 _W_ _ait,_ thought Will, before he lost consciousness completely. _‘We’?_

* * *

Will woke up in Sickbay. For a long, confused moment, he had no idea why he was there. It was dark, and he could hear the whirring of the machines; the nearest nurse was two rooms over, he could feel her boredom as she waited out the night shift.

Then, when the memory of that morning began trickling back to him, he was briefly surprised to have woken up at all. Why was he still alive, why hadn’t Hannibal just...

And then he remembered the rest of it.

Of course he was alive. He was still weak from the phaser blast, and from the drug Hannibal had given him, but he would recover from all that. Just the way he’d planned it. And he would recover, too, from the surgery they’d given him. The surgery that had caused this strange ache deep down in his gut- strange, yet horribly familiar.

He’d recover, all right. He was going to be perfectly fine.

But he wasn’t Will Graham anymore.


	10. Chapter 10

Long before the founding of the Federation, hundreds of years before Will Graham was born, a young Trill woman named Mischa applied to be joined with a symbiont.

The Symbiosis Commission was split on her. Too timid, that was the problem. Insecure. She was undeniably brilliant, and so tenacious that at age 22 she had already finished one doctorate and was hard at work on another, making her one of the youngest Trill ever to credibly apply for joining. But she had trouble even meeting her interviewers’ eyes sometimes, even as she stunned them with her insights, and she made no effort to socialize with the other candidates during the months of examinations. Most nights she just hid in her room and read.

In other years, she wouldn’t have made the cut at all. But there were fewer decent applicants than usual that year, and more than the usual number of available symbionts, so they decided to take a gamble on her. The Commission wouldn’t risk an experienced symbiont on such a flawed candidate, but they could spare one from the breeding pool.

For most potential hosts, newborn symbionts were less desirable than the previously-joined. You’d get the typical enhanced intelligence, and of course there was the honor of being the foundation of a new joined personality, one that would continue on for hundreds of years after your individual death. But you didn’t get any new memories, other than the memory of swimming around in a pool of broth, and the unjoined symbionts’ personalities were not terribly predicable. There was no telling who you would become.

They decided they’d offer Mischa a newborn, one who seemed a little more assertive than average. It might be just the thing to balance out her personality. If it went well, they’d wind up with a symbiont of exceptional genius to give to a future host. And if the joining was a failure… well. One or two of them always were, each year.

By the time they realized what they had made, it was far too late to stop her.

* * *

She often wondered, after, which of them it had been. Had the symbiont taken an ordinary woman and changed her into something extraordinary, or was it she who had changed the symbiont? Or maybe it was something unique to the combination of the two of them; paired with anyone else, maybe each of them might have turned out perfectly normal.

What a waste that would have been.

How had she ever believed that she was weak? Weak, damaged, worthless, pathetic… she had believed so many lies about herself, and she had let the shame cripple her. No brilliant thing she had ever accomplished had been able to convince her of her worth. But now she understood. For the first time in her life, she understood her own power, and she was amazed by how wrong she had been.

And she understood, too, that as wrong as she had been about herself, she had been even more mistaken about the others.

All her life, Mischa had feared the judgment of almost every person she had met. She had avoided their eyes and cringed at their voices; she had hidden behind her genius like a shield, as if it were the only thing protecting her from them. She knew now that she had never met a single person in her life who deserved that kind of fear from her. _They_ were the ones who were weak. All they deserved was her scorn.

Every limitation that had constrained her seemed meaningless now. Her fears about what other people thought, her fears of failure, the social codes she'd never understood but had been so terrified of breaking, she saw them all for what they were: other people’s morals, other people’s laws. Arbitrary rules that made the universe comfortable for the weak at the expense of the strong.

There had been other joined Trill like her, she knew. Ones who saw the world and the people in it the way she did. There were stories of people who had been so changed by their joining that they’d set themselves up as dictators or cult leaders or gods, calling for the enslavement of the host species and the elevation of the symbionts as the true rulers of Trill. She had no interest in that sort of thing. Those schemes were always swiftly and brutally put down, and besides, it was no concern of hers if the other joined chose to keep their collars on.

But they were not going to collar _her._

The Symbiosis Commission thought they could determine the course of the rest of her life, her suddenly centuries-long life. They thought they had the right to choose her next host, the person she would _be_ ; someone, almost certainly, who would be chosen specifically to 'balance' her, someone weak enough to douse her new strength like sand on a fire. All to make her a productive member of Trill society. A servant.

She gave them this: they grew suspicious quickly. Within weeks after her joining, there were questions about her, mutterings...

Two months into her orientation year, she ran. They must have been expecting it for weeks, because men popped out of nowhere to stop her.

But they were only security guards.

And for all they knew she'd come out... different, they’d clearly had no idea how far she would go.

* * *

They had given the symbiont a name, before they had put it inside her. Something dull, like all symbiont names – Thel, or Kel, or something like that, making her Mischa Thel, or Mischa Kel. She could never remember. It didn’t matter. It had never been _her_ name. It had been the name of the servant they had thought they were making.

She let the papers give the symbiont its new name, after her widely publicized escape from the Commission.

For the rest of its many lives, it called itself the Ripper.

* * *

She lived for sixty years after her joining, and they never caught her. They never caught the next Ripper either, or the one after that. The fourth, they managed to get their hands on for a year or two before he escaped again; after that, he took more care, and they never caught any of the others. Not even during those less-cautious lifetimes when a host decided to taunt the Commission with their failure to contain her, and left a trail of bodies for them to find.

During other lifetimes, the Ripper was more guarded, living an outwardly ordinary life and killing only when necessary. But after a one or two lifetimes of such caution, he’d always become a bit bored, and seek out a different kind of host.

Suitable hosts were never easy to find. The Ripper was a rare gift – it brought genius, knowledge, experience, but more than that, it brought _perspective._ It showed its hosts who they were, and who they were capable of being. It showed them how to throw off their arbitrary moral restrictions and stand above humanoid society like gods. Few people deserved such a gift. Few people deserved to become one with the Ripper, not just for a lifetime but for all of its lifetimes to come.

Sometimes, when it found them, the Ripper took its chosen hosts by force. More often it simply offered itself up; there were a hundred times more Trill who wanted to be joined than there were symbionts available for joining. On some of those occasions, the host knew what sort of symbiont he was agreeing to take. Other times, it came as a surprise.

Willing or not, many of the Ripper’s new hosts resisted the joining, at first, once they saw who it was and what it had done. But that resistance never lasted long. Within days, or months at the most, the Ripper was the host and the host was the Ripper.

Each new host brought her own wisdom, his own unique perspectives and skills. Some of these were mercurial, vanishing once the Ripper moved to the next host, but others became constants throughout all its lives. Although the cold ruthlessness of her years as Mischa became tempered over time, it never left her completely; as the fourth host, Abel, he picked up a bit of a sense of humor about himself, and as Abigail she learned a certain bloody-minded pragmatism.

Bedelia was the eleventh. She had been one of the unwilling ones, but she’d adjusted remarkably quickly. She brought a sort of glassy sophistication with her, and a sense of ease in wealthy social circles – useful skills for the Ripper to cultivate, given the number of lives she’d spent living on the fringes of humanoid society.

Both before and after the joining, Bedelia was a rather cautious person by nature. She never went in for the spectacle of the kill, the way many of the other Rippers did. She killed twice for the sake of curiosity, and three more times because she felt she had to. Aside from that, her crimes were more prosaic. As the Ripper she became a wealthy woman and rose to the heights of her chosen profession, and she was satisfied with that. She had no complaints about her life as she’d lived it.

Not really.

But there was a little tingle of regret, perhaps, that her own cautious nature had tamped down the Ripper’s natural urges to hunt and destroy.

When it came time for her to begin the search for her next host, she decided that after the death of this body, she was going to want a bit of a change. Someone who could really lose themselves in the thrill of transgression, the way she’d never quite been able to; someone, perhaps, who might enjoy reminding the galaxy of who the Ripper was, and how she’d earned her name.

So she decided to go looking for the Monster of Alpha III.

* * *

Hannibal, later, would remember the night when she’d finally found him as if on a split screen. He’d been crouched on the dusty floor of an outbuilding in an abandoned shipyard, and he (or, at the time, she) had been standing in shadow on an elevated walkway, watching himself work.

It was two hours before dawn, and he was almost finished staging his latest piece. There were flowers this time, hundreds of them, chosen to match the ones in a painting he’d seen in an offworld gallery. Obtaining them had taken weeks of planning. It would have been too traceable if he’d grown the flowers himself from seeds, or if he’d downloaded replicator patterns for them. Instead he’d spent weeks discreetly tracking down the varieties he was after, and had stolen them all earlier in the night. The majority were from two local flower shops, the others gathered from the gardens of half a dozen homes throughout the city.

To be sure that the flowers were as fresh as possible when he began assembling the work, he’d collected them last, after his other materials. That had been risky. The man might have escaped.

The papers often speculated about why the Monster went to so much trouble, after each new piece was discovered. He must have some perverse fixation on the materials he chose, they said, or he must be trying to send some obscure message with them, they must have some coded meaning, because wouldn’t it have been easier just to... but they missed the point spectacularly. The process of planning and composition was half the point of creating any work of art; it was no _trouble_ to take the time to do things right, to fulfill his vision properly. It was a pleasure.

And there was the thrill, too, of making the owners of those flower shops and gardens complicit in everything he’d done tonight. They too were a part of the work. So were the police, and the papers, and the people who would hear the news tomorrow or the next day and feel sickened or afraid. All of them were woven into the tapestry, and the open body lying on the floor at his feet was merely the center of it.

He was lost in those thoughts when he heard a woman’s voice above him say, “Hello.”

His head snapped up to the elevated walkway. There was a woman standing there, blonde, well-dressed, perfectly composed, with a phaser pointed directly at his chest.

She smiled at him and said, “I love your work.”

* * *

Bedelia hadn’t decided, before she’d seen him, if she would make the Monster an offer or if she’d simply take him. But once she saw the way he killed, she knew there was no reason to force the joining on him. If she asked him, he was going to say yes.

She had known from his murders that he was a perfectionist, someone who prided himself on his brilliant mind and careful planning; and she knew he was an egotist. A man like that might have seen joining as nothing but a loss of control.

But then, that night, she’d seen the enormous risks he took, necessary only for aesthetic reasons that no one but he himself would ever notice or care about. She’d seen the way he’d practically danced around his kill. Through his murders he projected an air of perfect self-control, but it was a mask. He was a creature of whim. A romantic. He was exactly the kind of man who would agree to give away part of his soul in exchange for what she could offer him. To see and know everything that the Ripper had seen and known in her centuries of life, to outlive himself, to become a part of the legendary Ripper, who had been dormant for so long that for many people she had become a myth.

And to die by his own hands.

She offered to let Hannibal kill her however he liked, before he took the symbiont out of her. She’d have died within days, anyway, once it was removed. For a sadist like him, to know exactly what his victims felt when he killed them... if nothing else convinced him, she was pretty sure that would.

She gave him five years to consider it. No time at all to her, but enough time for him to build it up in his mind, to _want_ it. And she gave him the proof he asked for: a new Ripper murder, the first in decades, in a city of Hannibal’s choice. She left flowers on the body for him. She figured he’d be charmed by that.

He was.

He performed the surgery himself after he killed Bedelia, lying on the floor next to her lifeless body. It was simple – local anesthetic, one painless cut across his abdomen with a laser scalpel, and then it was only a matter of placing the symbiont next to the wound and letting it make its way inside.

He kept his eyes on Bedelia as the symbiont crept into him. He wanted to see what it would look like when her face suddenly became as familiar to him as his own.

His first victim as the Ripper was also his cover story. He couldn’t very well show up for work without one – they bioscanned him every morning on his way through the front door of the hospital. Lara Fel was the unfortunate woman's name. Her symbiont was only on its second joining, and she was still naive enough to trust him. He staged an accidental death for her, a shuttlecraft accident, and then he took her symbiont out and destroyed it.

According to the official records, Hannibal Lecter became the third host of the symbiont Fel. He told the rescue party that he’d saved it.

* * *

The thing Hannibal brought to the Ripper, more than anything else, was his sense of beauty. The Ripper had been a brutal killer many times before, but never an artist. And the Ripper, in turn, helped Hannibal elevate his work. It gave him the perspective and experience to expand his own ideas about what he could create. He stopped recreating existing works of art – they brought a conventional standard of beauty to the scenes he staged, but his ideas of beauty, he found, did not need to be bound by convention. He began to foreground the bodies themselves, creating tableaus that were completely original.

And because it occurred to him as poetic, he began to eat his victims.

It was Bedelia who had made him think of that. He hadn’t just killed her, he had killed her and made her death a part of him. He would carry her with him forever – not just the memory of her life and her death, but an actual piece of her, the only part that still lived, in him. He had consumed her.

The combination of Hannibal and Ripper was perfect. Almost perfect. If Hannibal had one fault as the Ripper, it was that he was… overenthusiastic.

Seven years into his joining, as the Security forces on Alpha III closed in on the Ripper’s identity for the third or fourth time, Hannibal applied for a teaching position at a small college on the edge of Federation space, close to the wormhole at Deep Space Nine. If he had to, he could disappear into the Gamma Quadrant for a while; and if the trail got cold and they never found him, he could take a new name and move to a new planet and begin again there.

That had been the plan, before he’d met Will Graham.

* * *

It had begun as an innocent fascination, or as innocent as Hannibal was capable of. Trill and Betazoid was such a rare combination, unique in all of the Ripper’s experience. And besides, the man’s nerves were as taut as harp strings. He had wanted to reach out and strum them.

For all that Will defined his life by boundaries and barriers, it was trivially easy for Hannibal to slip past them. All he had to do was offer friendship, and Will opened his home and his mind to him almost instantly. He wasn’t weak – Hannibal would never have come to want him so desperately if he had been weak – but he was lonely. That was as perfect a door into his life as Hannibal could have hoped for.

He had thought about taking Will Graham from the moment he’d first laid eyes on him. It was a chance to experience a power he would probably never have the chance to experience again. But he knew how dangerous it would be. Will was so untrained and his abilities so poorly quantified that Hannibal had no idea if he could even survive sharing his mind with him.

Truthfully, he hadn't even known what would happen when he encouraged Will, in their sessions, to stop hiding behind his walls. He'd thought there was a good chance it could work exactly as he’d said it would… and he'd thought, too, that perhaps it would backfire completely, that Will’s mind might lose its barriers entirely. That would have been fascinating to see. But as it happened, his defenses were much stronger than Hannibal had thought they were. Will’s level of sensitivity would have killed most people.

And then, the more Hannibal saw of him, the more he became fascinated by the man, rather than by his condition.

He had no idea of his own power, of the beauty of his own gift. He had a black humor and a stubborn inner strength that Hannibal saw in himself as well, and his loneliness was oddly touching. And what was more, he _understood_. Better than he realized, he understood Hannibal – he believed so much of what Hannibal believed, saw the world so similarly to the way Hannibal saw it. But he was trapped by the very tools he had used to protect himself.

What a man he could be, if he could be freed from his willful delusions.

The longer Hannibal he had known him, the more he had wanted to take him… and yet, increasingly, he had found himself wanting to wait. He found that he was enjoying being with Will Graham enough that he was in no hurry at all to become him. If they grew close enough, he might even be able to take him willingly one day. Perhaps he could be made into something beautiful all on his own – and then, when they were finally joined, how awesomely powerful they would become...

...and then, Will had kissed him, and he had realized something that upon reflection he should have realized weeks before. It was the only thing that explained his ambivalence. But, after all, he was terribly out of practice.

That night, Hannibal decided that he wouldn’t take him. Not yet. Eventually, but not yet; this was too precious to give it up right away, too novel, too fascinating. It had been many lifetimes since the Ripper had fallen in love, and as he had told Will on that first night, he was not one to turn away from a new experience.


	11. Chapter 11

Jack had one foot out the door of his quarters when the call came over his combadge. “Sickbay to Captain Crawford. Captain – are you alone at the moment?”

He stepped back inside and let the door hiss closed behind him, and tried not to let any concern creep into his voice as he said, “Yes, Sickbay. Proceed.”

“Captain,” said the nurse, “Lieutenant Commander Graham and the passenger Hannibal Lecter were beamed into Sickbay five minutes ago. They are both unresponsive, and we believe they’ve been poisoned.”

“ _Poisoned?_ Why?”

“Doctor Lecter told us so, before he expired. We are working to stabilize them now, but we have no idea what they might have been poisoned with.”

“And no idea who might have done it,” Jack said. Despite his efforts, he felt a knot of worry in the pit of his stomach. He repressed it – it wasn’t helping. “Where were they found?”

“In the Lieutenant Commander’s quarters.”

“I’ll contact Security and have them meet me there,” said Jack. “Keep me informed of the patients’ conditions. And tell no one about this who doesn’t already know.”

“Yes, Captain,” he said. “Oh – one more thing. It’s odd. It isn’t in his file, but the medical scan of Doctor Lecter revealed that he carries a symbiont.”

“Yes,” said Jack, “I’m aware of that. Crawford out.”

* * *

By the time Jack arrived at Will’s quarters, the Security team was already inside and tearing the place apart. He pulled his Chief of Security aside and said, “Report.”

She shrugged, an oddly human gesture for a Vulcan. Lieutenant Commander Katz had grown up on Earth, and had retained a few maddening habits. “The room was undisturbed,” she said, “no sign of attack or forced entry. We’re testing all food and drink found in his quarters, and inspecting the replicator logs for any sign of tampering. I also have my officers checking the ship’s records for anything suspicious – transporter logs, shipments, passengers, new crew members, everything. But, Captain, it could take days. We have no way of knowing what-”

“We’ve got something!”

“...ah,” said Katz.

The shout had come from Will’s bedroom. Two Andorian Security officers rushed out and shoved a PADD into Katz’s hands, elbowing their way past Jack as if they hadn’t even noticed him. _Professionalism_ _,_ thought Jack, but this wasn’t the time.

“It was poison all right,” said one of them – Lieutenant Price, Jack thought – “in the whiskey glasses we found on the table-”

“ _Actually,_ ” said the other – Zeller? – “it’s a massive dose of a medical sedative-”

“And _yes_ , before you ask, we called Sickbay and told them already.”

“They were drinking whiskey at 0700 hours?” asked Jack. “Before Will’s shift?”

“Hey, who are we to judge?” said Price. Zeller rolled his eyes and said, “We checked the replicator logs, and the sedative was listed in there. Somebody made it right here in his quarters.”

“When?” asked Jack.

“Yesterday, 2100 hours, when Will was on duty.”

“It shouldn’t have even been possible to make this in a personal replicator,” said Katz. She scrolled through the report. “It’s supposed to be locked to Sickbay, and even then, you’d need a code. Whoever did this knew enough about replicators to trick the system.”

“Meaning that the time stamp could have been faked as well,” said Jack. “So we actually can’t be certain when this was done.”

Katz was silent for a moment. “I wonder,” she said. “It might be more productive to consider motive. Will has no enemies aboard that I know of. I suppose that in his time in Security he might have made a few. But we know very little about Doctor Lecter, except for…”

She paused again. “Except for what, Lieutenant Commander?” asked Jack.

“Except for the fact that he pretends not to be joined.”

“Hmm,” said Jack. “We did confirm his explanation for that.”

“Lecter’s _joined_?” asked Zeller. Jack silenced him with a look.

“Yes,” said Katz. “He said he never wanted to be joined in the first place, and was just trying to live a normal life. But maybe there’s more to it. This Fel symbiont, what if _it_ had enemies? The previous host – she died in an accident, didn’t she? But suppose it wasn’t an accident?”

It made sense – Jack could see the pattern. “If Fel was the target of an attack,” he said, “Doctor Lecter may have lied to us to protect its safety. Someone could still be after it. All right – keep searching through the records. I’m going to go have another talk with the Trill Symbiosis Commission. We need to know everything they can tell us about this symbiont.”

It was something, anyway. Somewhere to start. Jack left the Security team to their work, and headed toward his ready room.

He doubted that the Commission themselves knew anything that would be helpful; when he’d spoken to them before, to confirm Doctor Lecter’s story, they had been helpful enough but had seemed rather indifferent. But if they could put him in touch with Lara Fel’s old associates, then maybe-

He wasn’t halfway to his destination when Medical called him again.

“Captain,” said the voice on the combadge, the doctor this time. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Lieutenant Commander Graham is stable, but Hannibal Lecter has died.”

Jack stopped cold and placed his hand on the wall of the corridor. He allowed himself a moment to be shaken. Damn it! So he had failed already, a passenger under his care was dead, and they were no closer to finding his killer...

“However,” the voice continued, “the situation is not as dire as it may seem. Doctor Lecter himself was beyond recovery, but we were able to save his symbiont.”

Jack frowned. _Wait._ He was only passingly familiar with Trill biology, but he was almost certain that there was only one way to save a symbiont whose host was dead. “Are you telling me that-”

“Will Graham’s medical directive indicated his willingness to host a symbiont if necessary,” said the doctor. “As he is the only Trill aboard, and there are no Federation ships within hailing distance, it was standard procedure to-”

“Acknowledged,” said Jack. The doctor began to protest, she had more to tell him, but… “I’ll call you back in a moment. Crawford out.”

Something was wrong.

He didn’t know what, but something was wrong. Something didn’t make sense, or else it _did_ make sense, but it shouldn’t.

A young ensign eyed him as she walked past, and he realized that he was standing dead still in the middle of the corridor and staring off into space. That wouldn’t do. He had better get to his office. He walked another ten meters, and then slowed and stopped again.

He was beginning to see a new pattern here.

Oh, he could easily be wrong. He hoped he was. Because for this to be anything other than a coincidence, it would have to be something so outrageous that he was hesitant even to consider it.

But there were so many similarities that it would have been narrow to ignore them, and…

And Will _had_ suspected Lecter of something, at first…

“Crawford to Lieutenant Commander Katz.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“I need you to post a guard outside Sickbay.”

“Oh,” she said, “I did that an hour ago. With the poisoner still at large-”

“That’s not why I asked,” said Jack. He took a breath. “I’ve just spoken to Sickbay. Hannibal Lecter is dead, but the symbiont survived long enough to be _transplanted into Will Graham._ ”

A pause. So she saw it too.

“Captain,” she said, “this is exactly what Lecter said happened to his _last_ host. A sudden violent death, and then an emergency transplant.”

“An emergency transplant into the only surviving _witness_ to the death, who also just so happened to be the only other Trill within millions of kilometers,” said Jack. “Now what do you suppose the odds are of that happening _twice_?”

Katz didn't answer.

Instead, she said, “I think you’d better go make that call to the Commission, Jack.”

“Agreed. Crawford out. Crawford to Sickbay!”

“Captain?”

“How long until you can’t take it out again?”

There was silence on the other end of the comm, for a moment. Then, “There are perhaps eighty to ninety hours left until Lieutenant Commander Graham cannot survive without the symbiont. But, Captain, the symbiont itself will die within hours if it is removed. If it even survives extraction so soon after being implanted.”

“Eighty hours,” said Jack. “Then there’s still time. Doctor… we’re not certain yet, but it may be necessary to remove the symbiont in order to protect Will’s safety.”

She was quiet for so long this time that he worried she’d let the comm go dead. If she refused to do the surgery...

“I trust your judgment, Captain,” she finally said. “But I truly hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“So do I,” said Jack. “Have somebody call me the second he wakes up. And don’t let him leave. Crawford out.”

* * *

After he woke up, Will had only a few seconds alone in the dim silence of Sickbay. The sensors must have told the doctor that he was awake. She scampered over to him and began scanning his vital signs, with typically Vulcan bedside manner.

He was grateful for that. He couldn’t have coped with friendly reassurances just then. He followed the doctor’s instructions to move this way or look that way with vague obedience, but he couldn’t focus on her. He could barely even see her. He was reeling. Countless images were pouring across his mind as host and symbiont fell into sync, flashes of everything, everything he had – the Ripper had – everything _he_ had done...

It was always like this, at first.

Will didn’t feel invaded or taken over. There were no extra voices in his head. Just him. Him, but... different. Like the difference between who he’d been ten years ago and who he’d been yesterday.

Different but still him. That was what it felt like, anyway. But that didn’t make any sense, because he knew that these weren’t his thoughts in his head, his feelings, memories… or… no. No, they _were_ his. They just weren’t Will Graham’s.

His head was throbbing with pain, and that wasn’t so typical. It took him a moment to figure out why. It was the noise. Not real noise, but the noise in his head, the noise of the crew. He was still blocking most of it out, the way he always had, but the emotions that were leaking through, he didn’t feel used to them anymore. He was hyper-aware of every passing feeling. They overwhelmed his other senses. He couldn’t remember how he had ever been able to focus on anything else.

But as intense as that flood of emotion was, the memories were worse. Much worse. He couldn’t block _those_ out at all. They flickered across his consciousness completely out of order, many of them mundane, but the ones he remembered best, those were all... like what he’d seen in Hannibal that morning. Beautiful and hideous and bloody.

They were incomplete, though, those memories. There were voids where the feelings of his victims should have been, it was like remembering being blind or deaf. His mind kept trying to make sense of the gaps, filling them in with ambient emotions. The doctor ran a tricorder over his chest. She was pleased with the strength of his recovery. He felt that mild Vulcan satisfaction as in his mind’s eye he held a woman’s lungs in his hand and felt her scream with them. He’d had a lot of fun with that one.

He leaned over the side of the bed and vomited onto the floor.

The doctor tutted at him and made him lie back down, and went off to go find him a bedpan. Will didn’t know what to do, he didn’t even know who he was – no, he did, he was Will Graham, he – but he wasn’t, he was Hannibal, he was Bedelia, Mischa, Abigail, he was all of them, the _Ripper_ was all of them, and Will was only –

– Jack was coming.

Suddenly everything in Will’s mind snapped into focus. Jack was coming. He was just outside the door. Will could feel the throb of his concern, even a little dread, maybe, and something inside him was...

Did he know?

The door slid open and Jack walked in. Will realized that he hadn’t even tried to speak since… since he’d woken up.

Quietly, he tried: “You're upset, Jack.”

“Of course I'm _upset_ , Will. One of my passengers is dead.”

 _Not quite_ , Will thought.

Jack walked up to Will’s bedside and placed his hand on the rail. An oddly warm gesture, for him. Will sat up again, slowly, and moved to let his legs dangle down to the floor. It felt wrong to be lying down with Jack right there, looming.

Will didn’t feel safe with him.

Until he’d seen him, Will hadn’t been sure. He knew that he should tell Jack everything. And he knew that he wouldn’t. He didn’t _want_ to.

He wanted to want it, but he didn’t.

Instead, he asked, "Jack? Why are there guards outside the door?”

Will could see it in Jack's mind – he hadn’t wanted Will to know they were there. He’d forgotten that Will would be able to feel them.

Jack said, “The guards are there for your safety. Considering the circumstances of your joining.”

“So you think somebody's got it in for me?”

“It’s the obvious conclusion.”

A flicker.

No. That wasn’t what he thought.

He _knew_. Or he suspected – he wouldn’t have come alone if he knew everything. But even if he only suspected, that meant he’d already called the Commission – and if they hadn’t pieced their own suspicions together, it was only a matter of time until they did.

They’d been looking for him for three hundred years. Once they got their hands on him, they’d never let him escape again. Assuming that they didn’t shoot him on sight. Of course, he might not even get that far. Jack… pragmatic bender of rules that he was, the same Jack who'd used an unstable empath in multiple murder investigations… once Jack knew for certain what he was dealing with, would he even hand Will over to the Commission whole?

Or would Will find himself drugged again, and wake up in two pieces?

He hadn’t planned for this. He hadn’t meant for this joining to happen _now_ , here, surrounded by Starfleet…

Will didn’t decide to stand up.

He just did, slowly, the faint soreness from the surgery still throbbing below his ribcage.

“Will?” said Jack.

He didn’t answer.

Later on, when he thought about that moment, he thought that it was like the time he’d tried to quit drinking. When he’d given in and poured the first glass it hadn’t felt like some pivotal decision. It had barely been a decision at all. Just a compulsion. He’d thought about pouring it, and he’d known that he probably shouldn’t, and then he’d done it anyway. Hadn’t even tried not to.

And it had felt good, just like he’d known it would.

That was what it felt like, that night in Sickbay. No big moment. He just... knew what he was going to do.

“Will,” said Jack, “you shouldn’t be standing up. You need to-”

Will’s legs crumpled underneath him.

Jack lunged forward and caught him in his arms, just like Will had known he would.

And now Will had his phaser.

He wrenched it out of its holster as he shoved Jack backward, and stunned him before he hit the ground.

He heard a clatter as the doctor dropped whatever she’d been holding. He spun and stunned her, too, in the moment of stricken confusion before she could grasp what had happened and call for Security.

He had to leave, _now._ But the guards were coming. They’d heard the whine of the phaser beam, there was no time to hide from them.

His eyes fell on a wheeled medical console standing next to an empty bed. Just as the door flew open, Will launched the console toward it with a shove. It slammed into the guards and sent the first one sprawling; she was thrown against an empty bed and collapsed, the phaser flying from her hand.

The other one was only thrown off-balance, but that gave Will enough time to drop him with another beam. Now he just had to-

The first guard slammed into him, tackling him to the floor.

Will tried to scramble away, but she had him pinned. She had thirty pounds on him, and Vulcan strength, and she was desperate to stop him. She seized Will’s phaser arm with both hands and smashed it against the ground twice, three times, forcing him to loosen his grip. Another one of those and it would all be over.

But she’d left his other arm free.

Will twisted underneath her and snatched the combadge from her chest, and slammed it point-first in the hollow of her throat.

Her eyes grew wide as the first gush of green pulsed from her neck.

Confusion, first, even before the pain. She didn’t understand. The blood poured warm over Will’s hands.

Then the pain came, and then she understood, and pure shrieking panic burned through her. She was so afraid, and still so confused – she didn’t know how it had happened, but she knew she was dying. She knew. She tried to stand up, run away, anywhere, but she was already too weak to stand, and she could only roll heavily onto the floor beside him. Her mind was screaming louder than the loudest sound he’d ever heard, _pain panic fear no please don’t let this happen_

And then it snapped off like a switch, leaving a ringing silence in its wake.

For a moment, Will was gone. Obliterated. The death slammed into his mind like a meteor strike.

And then, in the brief, shattered mental chaos that followed that hideous silence, the only part of the Ripper that remembered how to function at all was the part that had been Will Graham.

With a strangled yell he scrambled up and away from the body and pressed himself against the bulkhead, panting and shaking.

_No, no, no no no-_

“Will!”

Jack. It was Jack’s voice. He was coming out of stun. Will must have only grazed him. He was still sprawled out on his side in the middle of the floor, not well enough to move yet.

Will couldn’t answer. He could only look at him. He was shaking so badly he wasn’t sure he could speak. He remembered why he had done it, but he didn’t understand.

“Will. Will! Listen to me. This _wasn't you_.”

Everything was so green. And there was so _much_ , he had never seen so much blood, it was everywhere, it was all over him, his hands, it was pooling around the body like a sheet of ice. The whole room smelled like copper. Of course, of course it wasn't him, he could never have done this, he wasn’t the Ripper, he had to get it out, they had to cut it out of him-

“This isn't you, it's him. You can fight him!”

But it was coming back, that feeling. He didn't know how to stop it. He didn't even know if it could be stopped. He was going to kill Jack. He was going to kill every single person on this ship who tried to stop him from leaving.

He looked down at the body. It looked different to him now than it had looked before. He only had a few moments left to make a decision, before some other part of his mind made it for him.

“Will, _fight him_!”

 _I should listen to him,_ he thought. _I should kill him._

He split the difference and ran, leaving a smear of brilliant green on the wall behind him.

The corridor outside Sickbay was deserted, but it wouldn’t be for long – Jack would be calling Security. He had to hide. He had gotten lucky before, he could never have taken on both of them at once, and besides, he’d dropped the phaser. He found the entrance to a Jefferies tube and climbed inside, and clambered down to the nearest computer console.

He couldn’t hide in here for long before the sensors found him. The second someone thought to do a heat signature scan, the computer would tell them exactly where he was.

But he’d just remembered that he was a damned Starfleet engineer.

* * *

Three minutes after Will Graham – or, as Jack had told them, the thing in Will Graham’s body – bolted out of Sickbay, the Security team spotted him with a heat scan. Or they thought they did. It only took them five more minutes to realize they’d been tricked, but that had been far too much time to leave Will alone with a console.

It wasn’t just the heat scanner – now every single internal scanner was offline, including their diagnostic scanners. The ones that should have warned them about someone tinkering around with the code in the main computer system.

They had to get the diagnostics back online before they saw the full extent of the damage. Tractor beams were offline. Transporters were offline.  _Warp drive_ was offline. It was nothing permanent, but it would take precious time to fix – and there was only one reason for him to have disabled the tractor beam.

There was nothing the crew of the Chesapeake could do but watch as their one and only warp-capable shuttle dropped out of the shuttlebay, turned, and darted away in a streak of white light.

* * *

Will ran for the next ten hours, jackknifing through every spatial distortion he could find in order to mask his warp signature. He didn’t know where he was going, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they would never get the ship back online in time to follow him.

He dropped out of warp at the edge of a scrap of nebula. He could hide in there, and then he could finally think. The overwhelming noise of the crew was gone, and for the moment he was safe – he’d have to ditch the shuttle soon, but he wasn’t running for his life anymore.

He could finally think about what he’d just done.

 _Jack was right,_ he told himself. _It isn’t me._ _It isn’t me._ _I can_ _fight it_. He knew he could. He _had._ He hadn’t killed Jack. He had managed to get off the ship without hurting anyone else, he had managed to control it, only...

Only he wanted to do it again.

He wanted to feel it again, that surge of terror, that eerie silence. It was so far beyond what he’d imagined.

It wasn't as if he was watching someone else want it and looking on in helpless horror. It didn't work that way. _H_ _e_ wanted it- and he was horrified that he wanted it, and he was amused that he was horrified.

He wanted to cut himself open and rip himself out of his own body. He remembered feeling that way before, many times, in many bodies, and he knew he had always lost that battle. Always.

And the other part of him, the part that was still reveling in the smell of the blood on his hands, had always won.

“You _bastard._ ”

Hannibal. _Hannibal_ had done this to him. Hannibal, the Hannibal who had sat beside his bed and held his hand and fallen in love with him, had done _this_ to him.

Will laid his head down on the shuttle console and sobbed.


	12. Chapter 12

He had to get clean. That was the first thing.

Will had spent a good twenty minutes or so crying his eyes out and screaming obscenities and pounding on the control console until he snapped a piece of the cover plate off, and now he felt a little calmer. Or at least, he’d worn himself out. But now, in the quietness after his rage, he’d begun to notice how the cramped shuttle smelled like the dried blood that still clung to his clothes and skin. It was suddenly unbearable. He’d brought her all the way here with him.

He knew he had bigger things to worry about. He had fallen asleep that morning as Will Graham and had woken up as the Ripper. He had fallen asleep as Hannibal and had woken up as Will. He was sitting in the middle of a nebula in a stolen Federation shuttle a million miles away from anyone at all. And he had no plan.

But if he tried to come up with a plan... if he started to think about where he might go, and what he was going to do when he got there, then he’d have to think about who he was.

He didn’t want to think about that.

But he couldn’t just sit there forever staring at the viewscreen. He had to do _something_. And because he didn’t want to think about most of the somethings he suspected he might like to do, he decided that he might as well start by getting clean. At least he could agree with himself about that.

The built-in sink in the shuttle’s bathroom wasn’t going to cut it. Will drummed his fingers on the cracked console once, and then he got up and stepped over to the replicator. It was odd, how aware he was of his body when he moved it now. Every movement felt strange, strained, like stretching a day after hard exercise.

“A bucket of soapy water, hot,” he said, “and a stack of towels. And a nail brush.”

He asked for the brush without thinking. When it appeared, he stared at it for a moment, with sick recognition.

Of course. He always used a brush to scrub the blood out from underneath his nails.

His clothes were beyond saving, and anyway, he wasn’t going to need a Starfleet uniform anymore… shit. Shit _._ _Starfleet._ He’d been with Starfleet nearly twenty years. Half his life. Will Graham’s life. He stripped the uniform off and shoved the pieces into the replicator – once they were off his body he could barely stand to touch them – and watched the clothes, and the blood that caked them, shimmer and dissolve and break down into their constituent elements and vanish. He’d make new clothes once he was clean...

_Oh._

_God._

He hadn’t been thinking. He should have made the new clothes first. Everything that he put into the replicator was recycled back into the system.

Now everything he made with this replicator was going to be made out of atoms taken from her blood.

Diluted, untraceable, indistinguishable from any other atom, but still _there._ He’d still _know_ they were there.

Even in the food...

_Don’t think about it. It doesn’t matter. Get clean._

For lack of a better place to put it, Will set the bucket on the floor of the cockpit and knelt down beside it with his stack of towels, and began scrubbing the blood from his skin. He’d left his underwear on. He found that the thought of being naked suddenly made him intensely uncomfortable, and that was something else he really, _really_ didn’t want to think about right now. He made do without a mirror, because he didn’t really want to look at himself right now, either.

This was going to take the better part of an hour. There was a lot of blood, more than he’d realized. She’d been crouched right above him when she’d… when he’d killed her. The blood had showered him, it was in his hair, on his neck, his hands, in every seam of his skin.

He hadn’t known her name. He was glad he hadn’t known it. He didn’t want the Ripper to know it, to know _her._ Somehow it felt like it would have been more of a violation, for him to have known her and still done that to her – to have killed her and then been a voyeur to her dying, to have stolen even the solitude of her last moments from her.

That death. Ever since the day he’d met Will Graham, he had wondered – fantasized, really – about what it would be like to _feel_ the deaths he made. That was half the reason he’d wanted Will in the first place. And now that he had him, he knew that the things he had imagined were only the palest imitations of what it was really like to die. The way it pulsed through you, that bright, pure fear, the _certainty._

He had felt her soul glow and waver and vanish like her blood in the replicator, and he had vanished with it, and then he’d come back to life.

God, it had been _beautiful._

The horror he had felt when he’d come back to himself was still with him. He didn’t want to think those things were beautiful. He didn’t want to think about them at all. And he didn’t want to want them to happen again. But he did.

He wrung the last of the green-tinged water from his hair and rubbed it dry with a towel. Clean enough, for now. But he hadn’t even started with the skin below his neck, and the water was already too green to go on using. He got up to feed the bucket back into the replicator and make another.

Green. It was almost funny, that it was Vulcan blood instead of red Trill blood, or blue Andorian. When parents taught Trill children about joining, that was always the metaphor they used – green. The host and the symbiont make a joined Trill the way yellow and blue make green.

It didn't feel that way to Will. The Ripper felt like inky blackness spilling through him. Mix it in and it just stays black, and whatever color you mixed it with disappears.

He couldn’t let it happen that way.

He might not be Will Graham anymore – not completely. But he wasn’t Hannibal either. He wasn’t Mischa. He was… whoever he was. Someone new.

And there was enough of Will Graham left, in this new man he'd become, that he didn't want to just roll over and let the Ripper win. Even though he knew how good it would feel if he did. Even though he knew, from long experience, that in the end there was no resisting the Ripper, no point in doing anything but accepting the person he'd become.

 _Because_ he knew.

He could be different, maybe. He'd always thought so, and he’d always been wrong, but why couldn't it be true this time? He had surprised the Ripper more than once, before they were joined. Maybe he could do it again.

He could try, at least. He owed Will Graham that much.

* * *

After he was clean and dry and dressed in newly replicated civilian clothes, it was time for step two: he needed to deal with the shuttle. By this point every Starfleet ship in the quadrant must have gotten word of what had happened, and they’d be looking for him.

During the hours he’d spent fleeing from the Chesapeake, Will had set up a number of false broadcasts and had altered or disabled as many scannable pieces of Starfleet tech as he could, and at long range, most scanners would now classify the shuttle as a small civilian cargo ship. But a glance at the data by a halfway-competent engineer would probably give him away, and besides, he couldn’t do anything about the way the shuttle _looked._ The disguise was paper-thin. He needed to get as far away from this ship as he could, as quickly as he could.

He took a few minutes to monitor the general transmissions coming in over subspace. Nothing about him, not yet – it seemed like they were keeping this internal to Starfleet for now, but that wouldn’t last long. If they didn’t find him within a day, two at the most, the whole Federation would be out looking for him.

He’d head for a port, then. Something close by, outside the fringes of Federation space, low traffic, poor trade. The kind of place where a starship dealer might trade an untraceable beater vessel for a clearly stolen Starfleet shuttle without asking a whole lot of questions. He called up a list of nearby ports and scrolled through the directories for mechanics and junkyards.

Perfect. There was a run-down space station, a ‘last stop before deep space’ kind of place, not three hours away from him. No Federation presence. Nothing there but a few places to buy food and supplies, and a handful of small-vessel repair shops and dealers. And judging by the names, almost all of them seemed to be run by Ferengi.

Any self-respecting Ferengi would take one look at him and his shuttle and know he was desperate. He was going to have to sell the thing for a fraction of what it was worth. And Ferengi minds were organized so differently than other humanoids’ that all Will could feel when he read them was practically-unintelligible noise. If Will wanted to know what they were feeling, he’d need to go off of facial expressions and body language alone, and that made him nervous. This was a bad situation to go into half-blind.

But it would never cross a Ferengi’s mind to report him, either. Not when he was getting top-of-the-line Starfleet equipment out of the deal. And once a Ferengi mechanic was finished with the shuttle, the pieces would never be found.

After he laid in a course for the space station, Will had to force himself to eat something. He hadn’t eaten at all since he’d woken up joined, and he was at the point of hunger where food didn’t sound appealing to him anymore. And... besides, there was that blood in the replicator. The idea of eating food from it now reminded him of what he’d used to do with his victims, when he had been Hannibal.

But he was being ridiculous. There was no point in being precious about this _now._ It wasn’t as if he hadn’t gotten her blood in his mouth when he’d killed her. He set the shuttle to autopilot and ordered a plate of galzak.

As it turned out, eating it hardly bothered him at all.

* * *

The shuttle dropped out of warp just within scanning distance of the space station, and Will ran a quick search for Starfleet ships in the area. Nothing. That had been what he’d expected, but he couldn’t be too careful now. He was running a terrible risk by letting himself be seen with this shuttle at all, but he didn’t have many other options.

A few kilometers out from the nameless space station, he started to feel the unreadable crackle of Ferengi minds. There were a few other species aboard, but it seemed to be mostly Ferengi, thank god. He ignored all the hails he was getting and pulled up to the shuttle bay door of a place called Gorek and Zeb’s. Not the biggest shop on the station and not the smallest, and from what the computer told him, they always had a few used vessels for sale. He opened a comm link and was answered by a lanky, young-looking Ferengi, who began to rattle off a prepared sales pitch.

“Welcome, my Starfleet friends, to Gorek and Zeb’s, your proprietor Zeb speaking, purveyor of the finest vessels in the quadrant, as well as all manner of, ah...”

He trailed off. It had taken him that long to notice that the man sitting in this Starfleet shuttle was not wearing a Starfleet uniform, and that he was alone.

Will said, “Interested?”

Zeb opened the shuttle bay doors for him without saying another word.

As he pulled into the broad, dimly-lit hangar, Will could see two dozen other spacecraft, half of them in various states of disassembly. The others looked ready to fly. If they weren’t...

_Cross that bridge when I come to it._

They were both waiting for him on the floor of the hangar when he stepped down from the shuttle. There was Zeb, who was tall for a Ferengi – he almost came up to Will’s chin – and the other one, who had to be Gorek and who must have been over a hundred years old. There was a sprinkling of white hair in his massive ears.

He scanned their faces for any sign that they might somehow know who he was, that they might be about to betray him.

“Well!” said Zeb. “Whatever can we assist you with today, Mister, Mister, ah, what did you say your name was?”

Will didn’t even bother telling him ‘no names.’ “Listen,” he said, “I don’t think there’s any reason to be coy with you, Zeb. You want this shuttle, and I don’t. Trade me some other warp-capable ship for it and I’ll get out of your hair, so to speak. Otherwise, there are plenty of other dealers on this station.”

“I don’t suppose,” said the other one, Gorek, “that you’d like to tell us where you came _across_ this particular vessel?”

Without giving it any thought, Will found he knew exactly how to respond to that. “Sometimes,” he said, “the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer.”

Zeb laughed, and Will caught a flash of pointed teeth. “Number two hundred and eight!” he said. “Never thought I’d see a Trill who could quote the Rules of Acquisition!”

Right. Will remembered now. He knew all three-hundred-and-something of the Rules by heart. He’d learned them while hiding out on Ferenginar half a dozen hosts ago.

Gorek hadn’t laughed, though. Will had no idea if he was playing the straight man, or if he genuinely wasn’t happy about the situation. He wished that he could read him. But even this close, all he could feel was garbled static.

“Yes,” said Gorek, “most impressive. However, it must be said that you’ve put us in quite a compromised position by bringing such, ah, disputed property into our place of business.”

A negotiating tactic? Or was he actually worried? “Five hours after I leave,” Will said, “this thing’ll be stripped down to a pile of parts and flying off to the other end of the galaxy. No one will ever know it was even here. Why do you think I came here in the first place?”

“Ah,” said Zeb, “you must forgive my uncle, he grows overly cautious in his old age, of course we will be happy to discuss some manner of arrangement, with allowances made for the high level of risk involved, of course...”

Will was only half listening. He was trying not to stare at Gorek, who was staring at him. Studying his face. For a moment he wondered why, before he remembered his eyes. Of course. He’d forgotten how conspicuous he was, with Trill spots and Betazoid eyes. How memorable.

Maybe it had been a mistake to come to Ferengi. He hadn’t realized how much it would bother him, not to be able to read them. It made him paranoid. They could be feeling _anything_ about him right now, and he had no way of knowing.

It wasn’t like every single Ferengi was the same. What if these two were out here in the middle of nowhere because they were insufficiently ruthless? What if they were the rare Ferengi who’d see his face in the wanted bulletins in a few days and feel some sort of civic responsibility to report him? As far as they knew right now, he was only a thief, but when they found out that he was a notorious murderer...

He felt an edge of that same panic he’d felt in Sickbay.

Zeb was still prattling on about risk assessments, all smiles, seemingly oblivious to his uncle’s scowl. Will remembered Rule of Acquisition Number Forty-Eight. The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife.

He’d have to kill them. Too risky not to. The thought came so easily that at first he didn't even question it. After they pointed him toward a functional shuttlecraft, he’d kill them both with a minimum of fuss and run for it. Probably he’d be lightyears away before they were even missed. What would he use, though, he hadn’t even thought to replicate himself another phaser...

He didn't realize he'd slipped into a reverie until he saw that Zeb had finished talking and was waiting for him to respond. He dug his fingernails into the palm of his left hand and strained to remember the last thing he’d said. He had asked if Will knew how to fly Ferengi tech.

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever. But it has to be ready to warp _now._ ”

Zeb led him over to a Ferengi Alliance shuttlecraft, with Gorek trailing along behind them. The thing had clearly seen better days, looked as if it had been driven through an asteroid field, and wasn’t worth a third of what the stolen shuttle was worth, but Ferengi ships were good fliers. He’d check out the engines, make sure the nacelles were in good repair, and then he’d… then…

He thought he might be shaking. He felt a twinge of pain in his left palm. One of the nails had broken the skin. He didn’t want to kill them but he _had_ to, he wasn’t safe, they’d seen his face…

What noises would those strange minds make, when he slit their throats?

He rushed through his engine inspection at record speed, hoping he wasn’t missing anything that would kill him the second he engaged the warp drive. _They’ll probably call Starfleet the second I fly out of this hangar. I can’t afford to let them live._ The engines looked fine. There was nothing wrong with the shuttle. Now, it had to be now…

“Thanks,” Will said, and scrambled inside the cockpit. He gripped the console and didn’t let go until he heard the door seal shut behind him. Then he engaged the comm system and said, “Now open the shuttle bay doors and let me the hell out of here.”

The Ferengis’ mental static shifted oddly. Will hoped they were just confused.

“Uh… no problem,” came Zeb’s voice through the comm. “Just give us a moment to pop back through the airlock and you’re free to go. Thank you kindly for patronizing Gorek and Zeb’s! Tell your friends!”

“I’ll be sure to do that,” Will said.

The moment the cargo bay slid open, he zipped out of the hangar before he had the chance to second-guess himself again, and once he was well clear of the station he engaged the warp drive. It had more of a kick to it than his old shuttle. Good. He needed to put as much distance between himself and those men as he possibly could, as quickly as he could, because-

_Why didn't I do it?_

That was the question he asked himself, as the stars streaked past his new shuttle. Not ‘why did I think that,’ or ‘how could I have thought that,’ or ‘thank god I didn’t go through with it.’

He was furious with himself. It had been insane to leave them alive – now he was barely any safer than he’d been before, because he couldn’t know that they wouldn’t turn him in. Now he’d have to switch craft again, at least twice, maybe more, before he could really feel secure.

He’d won. He’d beaten the Ripper again, the way he’d told himself he would. And he was miserable _._ When he read the feelings of criminals, the way that dragged him down – that was nothing next to this. Then at least he knew that it was really someone else feeling those things. That it was temporary. Even when he got lost inside them, he could always find his way back to himself.

But now, he was the source of it. There was nothing safe to fight his way back to. All he could do was keep running.


	13. Chapter 13

Even eight hours’ warp from the Ferengi base, Will still didn’t really feel safe enough to sleep. But he was going to crash the shuttle if he didn’t. He hadn’t slept since the sickbay, if you could really call that sleeping, and he was starting to worry that he’d accelerate himself right into a sun while trying to work the climate control.

He needed a place to hide. Even in this new shuttle, he couldn’t be too careful. Anyone alone out here would be noticed by a passing ship. And it would only be a matter of hours now before Starfleet gave up on keeping his escape internal, and told the whole quadrant who he was and what he’d done.

He ran a couple of quick scans – the nearest star system had no habitable planets, but there was an asteroid belt he could hide in. A few of the larger asteroids had just enough mass to hold the shuttle in their gravity. He flew over to the belt on impulse power and landed on a bare rock two hundred miles across, on the sunward side. He’d be harder to detect there. No one passing by the system would notice him by sight, and the solar radiation would fuzz up basic sensors. Safe enough, for a few hours at least.

So he’d get some sleep, and then he’d wake up and fly off and swap shuttles a few more times, and then…

And then, what?

How long until he grew weak enough to let the Ripper out again?

It had been close, on that Ferengi station. Close enough that Will hadn’t been sure, until he’d warped away, that he wasn’t going to kill them. He still wasn’t sure that he shouldn’t have. And the next time he felt that urge, and the time after that… how long would it be, until he didn’t have it in him to fight like this anymore?

He knew how often the hosts resisted. And he knew how little it mattered. Days, for the most susceptible ones; a couple of weeks at the longest stretch. He could resist it with every ounce of resolve that he had, and it still wasn’t going to be enough.

Or... was that just the Ripper putting lies into his head? Trying to convince him that he had no choice but to give in?

He had no idea. He would never have any idea again.

Maybe he should just fly into the sun after all, and end this like he ought to.

But it was pointless to think that way. He wasn’t going to kill himself. Or turn himself in, or cut himself open while there was still time. He _knew_ he wasn’t. Just like he’d known that he wasn’t going to tell Jack the truth, that he was going to kill that woman, that he was going to run.

Just like he’d known, the moment Will Graham had looked inside his mind, that he was going to have to take him.

He had never intended to do it that way. But there had been no other choice. Or... well. There'd been no other _acceptable_ choice, not for Hannibal – no other choice that would have allowed him to keep his Will. It was either take him right then and there, or else kill him.

If only he’d had more time. He might have persuaded Will to take the Ripper willingly – or at least he might have been able to make him more pliable, less resistant.

Then he might have been able to mitigate the pain he was feeling now.

He hated himself. All of his selves. Hated Hannibal for taking him, hated Will for fighting him, hated them both for being so damned blind to what he now saw had been the only possible outcome for the two of them – collision. And then pain.

_What a couple of fucking idiots I was._

Will powered the system down to standby mode and stalked off to the bunk in the rear of the shuttle. If he _wasn’t_ going to kill himself, then he might as well go ahead and get some damned sleep.

* * *

He had guessed right – when he woke up and checked the subspace chatter, it was all about him. Apparently Starfleet had given up on keeping this a secret, or else someone had leaked it. Briefly Will wondered if it had been Jack. It was the kind of thing he’d do.

At least it sounded like the Ferengi hadn’t snitched on him – according to the chatter he’d been last seen warping away from the USS Chesapeake in a Starfleet shuttle. But even so, now half the quadrant was going to be keeping an eye out for him. Or, more precisely, for a man with dark hair, pale skin, Trill spots, and Betazoid eyes. He couldn’t leave the asteroid looking the way he did. There was nobody else in the galaxy who looked like him.

On some level he’d known that this was going to be necessary, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it. Now he was out of time. He was going to have to get rid of his spots. Betazoid eyes were notoriously difficult to hide, but it would only take few passes over his skin with a dermal stimulator to hide the spots, and then no one would ever know he was Trill unless they checked his genes. Minus the spots he could pose as half human – he couldn't pass for a full Betazoid without telepathy, even if he looked like one.

So he’d need to replicate a dermal stimulator. The Ferengi shuttle’s replicator had the standard suite of medical files, thank god – he hadn’t thought to copy the files over from the Starfleet shuttle before he’d bolted out of the space station, and he’d have really been screwed without them. He was going to have to start planning things out better. This wasn’t like him. Any of him.

He asked the replicator for the dermal stimulator, and then he asked for a mirror. He was going to have to look at himself for this.

He hesitated. He hadn’t looked in a mirror since it had happened. He hadn’t wanted to. He knew how it was going to feel.

After another moment of hesitation he left the mirror sitting in the replicator tray without looking at it, and walked over to the sleeping berth. He would deal with the rest of his body first, before the face. It would be easier that way.

He stripped off his clothes and sat on the lower bunk and got to work with the dermal stimulator, starting with his feet. The markings traveled up both sides of his body in broad bands, from his toes to his forehead. It was going to take him ages to erase them all completely.

It hurt less than he’d expected it to. Just a mild burn. And there was something weirdly soothing about the process, calmingly familiar. He’d almost forgotten that he was a doctor. It felt good to be using his hands this way again, operating on-

Will stopped himself before he could finish that thought. Hannibal hadn’t only operated on people he was trying to _heal_ , and this was not a good time to be thinking about that.

It took him a little over two hours to remove all the markings below his neck, and then he couldn’t put it off anymore. He put his clothes on and went back to the replicator for the mirror, and then he brought it over to the sleeping berth and sat down and looked.

It wasn’t like looking at a stranger. It was still his face. Or, well, Will Graham’s face anyway, the face of the man he used to be. But... it was _Will Graham’s_ face, too.

Will Graham, the man he had fallen in love with.

He was beautiful. It made him almost angry, how beautiful he looked to himself now. Will had always known that he was attractive, and he had always resented it, because it got in the way of being left alone. Meeting Hannibal had been the first time in fifteen years that he’d been happy to attract that kind of attention.

It had worked too well.

And now Will was seeing himself the way Hannibal had seen him, and he could remember... well. Everything. He could remember running his fingers over the curve of his waist and tracing the line of spots down his body. Gazing at his perfect face. Tasting his skin.

He could remember wondering what it would be like when this body was finally his.

He hurled the mirror across the room, and it clanged against the bulkhead and fell to the floor. And then, after a minute or two of silent rage, he went over and picked it up again. He still had to finish getting rid of the spots.

And once they were gone, they would just be one more thing that the Ripper had stolen from him.

* * *

In the first few days after he left the asteroid, Will swapped shuttles three more times. The first two he stole, ditching the old ones near shady chop shops, and the last, he traded one of the stolen shuttles for. And somewhere in that span of time, his ninety hours ran out.

He hadn’t been keeping track, because it didn’t matter – he had known from the moment he’d shot Jack that he was going to keep the symbiont. Or that it was going to keep _him_. But after he warped off in his fifth and final shuttle, he glanced at the stardate and realized that he had definitely run out of time. He couldn’t survive without the symbiont anymore – even if they found him, they couldn’t take it out, not without killing him.

_So that’s that, I guess._

His newest shuttle was another Ferengi one. He’d found he liked the kick they had, and there was something about the ugly orange interiors that suited his mood. He’d keep this one for a while – he was finally safe, more or less. They were never going to stop looking for him, but the danger was no longer immediate. He could stop running.

He wasn’t exactly overjoyed about that. Running had occupied his time. Now he was going to have to find something else to do with himself. Something besides the thing he _really_ wanted to do. He couldn’t just jet around alone in a shuttle for the rest of his life.

But he didn’t exactly have an overabundance of options. Even though his gift was more under his control than it had ever been, he wouldn't be able to handle a heavily populated planet for long. He really hadn’t considered the implications of that when he'd taken Will Graham. It was going to be a serious pain in the ass.

His options were either barely-habitable backwater planets, or else space. Space, then. He’d sign on with a cargo ship, the kind that wouldn't ask for any official documentation – a smuggler, maybe. Maybe he could find something headed out on a long-haul mission, get clear of the Federation entirely for a while, let the search die down. It was a decent plan. He knew the life. And besides, flitting around from planet to planet would be an ideal way to hunt for-

“No. _No._ ”

He gripped the console with both hands until his knuckles turned white. No. He was not going to hunt people down like prey. No matter how much he wanted to. No matter how good it would feel.

“Fuck you,” he muttered to the empty cockpit. “Just _fuck you_.”

* * *

He’d worked his way out close to the galactic rim by then, keeping to the fringes of Federation space. Habitable systems were sparser out there, which was great for avoiding attention, but not so great for finding halfway-decent spaceports. After asking the computer, he’d found the only one place within a week’s journey where he could count on finding a long-haul smuggler – Daphne IV. He’d sped over to the Daphne system at his shuttle’s highest warp, and now he was in high orbit above the planet. And he was afraid to go down to the surface.

Even though Daphne IV was a class L planet, only barely compatible with humanoid life, its spaceport was still going to be the most populated place he'd been in over ten years. There were ten thousand people there on any given day, all packed into a few square miles of land. Even with everything Hannibal had taught him, he had no idea if he’d be able to tolerate it.

But he was already here. He had to try. It wouldn’t kill him. At the worst it would knock him unconscious, which… actually, that would still be pretty fucking bad, because if anybody found him like that and took him to a doctor, he was going to wake up in a jail cell.

Will crept down through the atmosphere as slowly as his shuttle could manage, listening. He started to be able to feel it at about three miles up, but it wasn’t too bad, just a hum at the edge of his awareness. A mile up, it started to feel like his old cabin down in the cargo bay – a persistent fuzz of blurred feelings, with flashes of something more distinct every now and then.

All right, then. The port itself was going to suck, but it would be tolerable. Barely.

He set the shuttle down half a mile from the edge of town, in a broad, level snowfield in the lee of a hill. A little snow was still coming down, and the computer told him that it was twenty below outside, and getting colder. He’d replicate himself some warmer clothes, and then he’d walk the rest of the way to town. That way, if he felt himself starting to lose it, he could always just turn back around.

Approaching the port wasn’t exactly easy for him, but it could have been worse. _Should_ have been worse. The last time he’d visited a place like this, he’d pushed back against that flood of emotion until he snapped under the strain. He’d been beamed off the planet straight into sickbay after twenty minutes, and it had taken him a week to recover from it. But now he knew what to do. He didn’t push back against it; he let it flow through him, pass into his mind and back out again.

It didn’t work perfectly. By the time he made it into the town proper, all those minds were blaring through his brain like a red alert siren. It was horribly distracting, to the point that it made him feel a little slow and stupid, like being drunk. But he could never have come there at all if it hadn’t been for Hannibal.

And of course, he realized, that had been half the point. What good was a host if he couldn't function? Hannibal hadn’t taught Will Graham all those things out of the goodness of his heart. He had been preparing him for a situation exactly like this one. He’d been _grooming_ him.

_Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._

But despite the avalanche of minds pounding through his brain, and despite the fact that he was suddenly incredibly pissed off, there was something oddly comfortable about being in the spaceport. His childhood – Will Graham’s – had been spent in and between places exactly like this, hopping from port to port in his dad’s cargo ship. After all the time he’d spent in sleek, modern Starfleet vessels, it was sort of nice to be back in the junky part of space again.

There were hundreds of species of people here, talking and shouting in languages his translator couldn’t completely comprehend. Shops selling secondhand machine parts and pricey exotic jewelry and questionably legal liquor. Street vendors preparing strange-smelling food that he couldn’t begin to identify. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed these kinds of places.

He wished he was able to enjoy it more. There were so just _many_ minds here, and so many different kinds – after half a lifetime of Vulcans it was overwhelming. He could only just barely stand it. He felt dizzy, confused, diluted…

Diluted.

Will stopped dead in the middle of the street, and somebody slammed into him from behind. She yelled some obscenity at him, but he wasn’t listening.

Diluted. That was exactly how he felt, being here.

He leaned against the side of a building to get out of the way of traffic. There was a fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he wasn’t sure whether it was excitement or fear.

Because Hannibal had been right.

_Did any of your doctors ever suggest to you that the combination of Betazoid and Trill might be inherently unstable?_

_It’s as if you become temporarily joined with every mind you see. It’s what we’re designed to do._

He’d been so focused on the strain of controlling all those emotions that he hadn’t stopped to notice how they actually _felt._ How _he_ felt. There were thousands of other people’s minds inside his head now, flowing through him, into him, mixing themselves into his consciousness. Minds that had never been part of the Ripper.

He still wanted the things the Ripper wanted, felt the things the Ripper felt. That hadn’t changed. But now those desires were half-buried under the rest of the chaos swirling in his brain – and Will could function in that kind of mental chaos far better than the Ripper could. He’d been doing it for most of his life.

It would give him just enough of an advantage to keep resisting.

Forget the cargo ship. He was going to stay right here. He’d find work someplace – a shipyard mechanic, maybe, there’d be lots of jobs like that here. He’d get himself a job, and he’d stay, and he’d fight. And he’d _keep_ fighting, until he either lost or dropped dead of old age.

 _I’ll get used to it, though,_ he thought, with an odd edge of fear. _This_ _isn’t going to_ _work forever._

He couldn’t tell if that was Will’s fear talking, or if it was the Ripper trying to reassure himself that it would only be a matter of time.

It hurt him just to be there. He still had that dizzy drunk feeling, and he was already starting to get a headache that he knew was going to turn brutal in an hour or two. He wanted to leave, desperately. He wanted to find the ship he’d come here to find and fly away and never set foot on a planet again for the rest of his life.

Or a part of him wanted that, anyway.

That was how he knew it was a good idea to stay.


	14. Chapter 14

It snowed almost every day on Daphne IV, except for when it got too cold to snow – the temperature on the surface veered between around zero and negative fifty, sometimes in the course of a single day. Soft snow, mostly, and then sometimes blizzards that buried the streets of the spaceport in two-meter drifts, or sleet storms that pounded on the hull of Will's shuttle like tiny asteroids. And the planet’s gravity was less than Will was used to; after all those years on the Chesapeake, he’d adjusted to Vulcan gravity. The lightness made everything outside his shuttlecraft feel a little insubstantial, like he was living in a dream.

He kept the life support system in the shuttle set to the Vulcan-normal settings he was used to – 1.2 Gs, 30 degrees Celsius, moderately low oxygen. It would have been easier for him in the long run if he'd set it closer to the local normal and let himself get acclimated, but he didn't want to. He'd lost enough already.

The first five days that he spent on the planet, Will just walked into the spaceport, stayed until his head was screaming with pain and he felt as if he was about to throw up, and then stumbled back to the shuttle again. Each time, he was able to take it for a little longer before he broke down. It wasn’t that the voices got any quieter, or even any less painful; he just learned to endure the pain a little better, to function through it. And after that, once he thought he could hold himself together for six or seven hours at a time without curling up into a ball and crying, he started to look for a job.

He spent the next two weeks wandering into shipyards and used spacecraft lots and garages, all close to the edge of town where the noise was a little more bearable, and asking if they needed anything fixed. A few places told him to fuck off; a few places gave him an engine or an instrument panel to fix, and then paid him a little latinum and sent him on his way; and then he stumbled across a mechanic named T'Akara whose assistant had just run off with a trading vessel, and she hired Will on full-time.

Will needed the job – the planet wasn’t Federation, and they still used money here. The replicator would fill most of his needs, but he was going to need latinum if he wanted to buy anything the replicator didn’t know how to make. But more importantly, he just needed something to do with his time. He needed something to think about besides his disaster of a life, and he needed a reason to be near other people. Being alone with his thoughts was not as relaxing as it used to be.

After he found the job he followed the same routine every day. He’d walk the mile and a half to work in the morning, taking the long way around the town rather than through it; he’d work his shift, ignoring his slowly building headache, and generally stay late until T'Akara all but kicked him out; and then he’d walk into the center of town and let it bat his brain around like a cat toy.

Sometimes he’d look for the calmest, gentlest mind he could find, and he would follow it through the torrent and grab hold of it and feed on it, until the person the mind belonged to moved too far out of range and was lost in the crowd. And then he’d find another one. Other times, he didn’t try to hold on to anything, not even himself. He’d sit down someplace where he wouldn’t be noticed, like next to a stack of crates in an alley, and he’d let himself be tumbled by the raging currents of emotion around him. When he did this, he was sure he looked as if he wasn’t in his right mind. He’d find himself laughing someone else’s laugh, crying someone else’s tears, digging his nails into his palms with someone else’s anger. Sometimes all at once.

But they weren’t the Ripper’s feelings, so he wanted to feel them.

For the first little while, that was all Will did besides work and sleep. He’d stay in town until he had completely exhausted himself and his headache became too crushingly painful to think through, and then he’d stay a little longer, and then he’d go home and take something for the pain and go to bed.

And whenever he felt like giving up and going home early, there was one thing he could tell himself that would always make him change his mind: every bit of pain and exhaustion he felt was being felt by the person who had done this to him.

_This is what you wanted, you son of a bitch._

_Was it worth it?_

* * *

He left the shuttle where he’d parked it, and he kept on living there. It wasn’t far enough away from the spaceport to be out of range of the noise, but it was just barely quiet enough that he could get to sleep, and he only woke up once or twice a night from the residue of other peoples’ nightmares. If he’d tried to live in the town itself, it would have been more like twenty or thirty.

He thought about moving the shuttle farther away from the port at night, and flying it back in before work in the morning. It would have made it easier for him to sleep. But he could recognize that thought as a trap he was setting for himself. If he took off in the shuttle, he might just... not come back down again. Keep flying right out of the atmosphere.

And besides, even if the noise was driving him a little bit insane, he still felt less insane here than he had felt since the joining. He couldn’t stop thinking or wanting, but the doing, that seemed to be more or less under his control. More or less.

But sometimes he wondered if he'd created more problems than he’d solved.

The thoughts came slower now, but they were more insidious for it. They crept up on him, slinking in through the racket in his head, and they slipped themselves into his daydreams.

He would be taking apart an old fuel injector, or sweeping up metal shavings, or wandering through the city center, and he would find himself remembering. The flash of a knife, the whine of a phaser, the thrashing of a dying body. The look in a woman’s eyes as he strangled the life from her. Flowers nestled in a man’s bloody, empty chest.

He had killed so many people in so many hideous ways, and he remembered every single one of them.

Those memories were incomplete, though. Like holoprograms with no sound. None of them could compare to the guard, the one he’d killed with Will’s own hands, the one whose death he had felt with her as she died. That was the death he remembered most often. And he could make so many new memories like that one, if...

_No, no._

He had been weak enough to kill her. He told himself he'd never be that weak again. He’d been brand new, disoriented, he hadn’t yet learned to control himself, the Ripper would never be able to take hold of him like that now.

But sometimes, he would find himself listening to some mind in a crowd, and he'd realize he knew that they ought to die.

Every now and then, those people caught Will staring before he realized what he was thinking, and their emotions shifted in response to him – they were annoyed, or flattered, or confused.

He wondered how they would shift again, if he took them.

He could make them feel such extraordinary feelings.

That would be how he would differ from Hannibal. He'd thought about that, despite his efforts not to. His art would not be painting, it would be music. He would play his victims like instruments that only he could hear, with each unique composition ending in the same crescendo.

It would be easy and satisfying, and he would never be caught.

Those feelings were like a constant trickle of sweat running down the back of his neck. He wanted to reach up behind him and wipe them away.

* * *

And then it had been two months since the Ripper had come to Daphne IV, and he had worked and slept and felt other people’s feelings and tried not to think his own thoughts, and in all that time, he hadn’t killed anybody at all. He was genuinely surprised that it had worked so well. Staying on the planet had been a desperate gamble, one that might easily have failed. Part of him was disappointed, and he was grimly satisfied by that disappointment.

But he knew that he had to do more.

It wasn’t over. He wasn’t Will Graham, and he wasn’t tamed. He was caged, that was all – and he had no way of knowing how strong the cage was, or how long it would last.

There had been a seething frustration inside him ever since he’d decided to stay here, and it wasn’t going away. It was building. He remembered the vertigo he’d felt in Hannibal after he and Will Graham had fought, the conflicts between all his selves as he’d tried to decide whether to forgive him or leave him or make him pay. He felt like that now, except now it was so, so much worse.

Even if Will had buried it under thousands of other minds, he couldn’t just ignore the fact that one half of his own mind was at war with the other half. He couldn’t just sit around and let the war play itself out. He knew how that would end. He knew which side of himself would win: the side that had always won.

He needed to use whatever time he had, while the cage still held, to find a better way to beat the Ripper back.

* * *

After that, he only spent an hour or two in the town after work. Just enough to make him feel like he wasn’t himself anymore. And then he’d come home and start combing through the reams of data files that he’d bought in town or pulled off of subspace, about joined Trill biology and psychology and theory and history. He was going to teach himself everything there was to know about joining, and he was going to use it against the Ripper.

He had studied joining extensively when he had been Mischa, and most of the others had read up on particular topics of interest to them, but much of that knowledge was hundreds of years out of date by now. Besides, he remembered a lot of it about as well as he remembered his Intro to Exobotany class from his first year at Starfleet Academy.

And even the things he did remember, he couldn’t be sure he could trust. He had no idea if the Ripper was capable of lying to him.

Will didn’t find any instructions in the data files on how to resist a symbiont, and he hadn’t expected to. Who else but him would ever _want_ to resist? Only the most accomplished Trill were invited to apply for joining, and only the most committed handful of those applicants made the cut. For them, failure to integrate was a tragedy.

But that meant there were lots of instructions on things you absolutely positively _should not_ do under any circumstances, if you were failing to integrate.

So Will did them all.

You were supposed to try your hardest not to think of your current life as ‘your’ life and the other hosts’ lives as someone else’s. Will thought he had a bit of a head start on that, what with the amount of time he’d spent telling the Ripper to go fuck itself. But when he tried to think of it as something really, completely separate from himself, it didn’t feel true at all. It was no easier than if he’d tried to tell himself that he had never been Will Graham; that Will Graham’s entire existence up until the moment of joining had happened to some stranger.

But even though it didn’t feel true, he had to at least try it. So every morning now, before he left for work, he would force himself to look in the mirror – he still hated doing that – and he would glare at his reflection and tell it, “My name is Will Graham.” It never stopped feeling like a lie. He kept on doing it anyway.

You were supposed to avoid indulging your current host’s hobbies and interests for a while, and take up some of the past hosts’ hobbies instead. Will laughed out loud when he read that part. Trying not to take up his past hosts’ hobbies was pretty much all he did these days.

It was good he’d taken the mechanic job, then. He’d only gone for that type of work because he knew how to do it and the demand was there, but once he read that particular article, he realized how lucky he was to have found something so close to his old job in Engineering. It was something that could function as a handhold on Will Graham – using his mind the way Will Graham had used it, working with his hands the way Will Graham had worked with them. He paid more attention to his job after that.

You were supposed to avoid your current host’s favorite foods, and eat the old hosts’ favorite foods instead. Guiltily, Will realized he had been doing exactly that, which was exactly the wrong thing for him to have done. He hadn’t really thought about it at all – he had just been ordering whatever he felt like eating from the replicator, or buying whatever looked good to him in town, and it had never occurred to him that Will Graham would not have chosen those things.

Will Graham had mostly eaten Trill and Vulcan food, and nothing too elaborate. Will went back to those things immediately, and he ate nothing else. It didn’t taste the same to him anymore.

You weren’t supposed to dwell on the things you lost when you were joined. Will didn’t have to be told to dwell, but now he made a practice of it. At night, after he had finished his research and before he went to bed, he would turn the viewscreen on and watch purple shadows moving across the snow, and he would have a good long think about the things he had lost. Things that the Ripper had taken away.

There was one loss, though, that he tried not to dwell on at all. The thing that, for a little while, he’d thought of as the best thing that had ever happened to him in his life.

But there was no point in missing him. The Hannibal he had known back then had never really existed. And besides, he _was_ Hannibal. And besides, Hannibal was dead.

* * *

Another two months, and Will still hadn’t killed anyone. And he still had no idea how long that was going to last.

He was still diligently doing everything he wasn’t supposed to do. He was still spending every night researching and thinking and plotting against himself. He was still rinsing his mind out every day with other peoples’ emotions – and the headaches had gotten easier to cope with, though he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.

But he didn’t want what the Ripper wanted any less than he had before. And the frustration smoldering in his chest had not gone away.

The things he was doing to try to force himself apart were not just painful. They were factually wrong. He _was_ the Ripper. He knew he was. And despite what he’d hoped, he had found nothing in his research that contradicted what he knew. The Ripper was more like a third hemisphere of his brain than it was a separate entity.

He didn’t want it to be. He didn’t want to want the things the Ripper wanted. For now, that was enough to keep himself in check. For now.

But every time he had one of those bloody thoughts, he wanted it just a little more.

He hadn't won. He wasn't even winning. He was just hoping he could run out the clock on his life before he lost – before he decided that he couldn’t stand the noise and the confusion anymore, and engaged the shuttle’s thrusters and took it up into the sky. And once he was free from the planet, he'd be lost. He'd never let himself set foot on land again, and he would lose the only tool he had to fight against his desires.

He told himself, as he had every day since the joining, that it was the Ripper who wanted those things, not him. But he _was_ the Ripper. And the Ripper didn’t want to live this way.

But giving in was not an option, so Will kept resisting.

And then one night, as he was scrolling through yet another data file, he got a really, _really_ bad idea.


	15. Chapter 15

He’d been reading through decades-old medical journals when it occurred to him. There wasn’t much new information in the journals – the standard treatments for poorly integrated Trill, the ones he was deliberately ignoring, hadn’t changed in over a century. But he’d thought that maybe he could find a records of some old experimental procedure that had failed. Something that had made the patient’s problem worse instead of better. Something else he could try.

And then, that night, he found an article.

There had been a joined woman, one of the few Trill whose joining was so flawed that the symbiont had been allowed to die with the host rather than be transplanted. They had tried everything to help her, and no treatment had had any effect on her state of mind at all, except for one: the Rite of Emergence. It was supposed to be a method for delving into your subconscious, finding buried insights – talking things over with yourself. But for the patient to go through the Rite in her already poorly-integrated state was more like dissociating. It made her condition significantly worse. It reenforced the delusion that the symbiont was separate from her, an other. An invader inside of her head.

Of course. He should have thought of it months ago. It made perfect sense. He knew exactly how to perform the Rite, he had done it before, many times. If it worked on him like it had worked on the patient, if he could force himself to think of the Ripper that way...

But, god, what was he thinking? This was an _awful_ idea. His mind was too fragile for any of this, and if he kept looking for new ways to tinker around in his brain to resist the joining, he was going to snap completely. He had no idea what would really happen to him if he tried the Rite – it would probably only hurt him, it probably wouldn’t make his mind feel any clearer, and really there was no point in resisting at all, he should just go ahead and-

“You’re lying,” Will said to the empty cockpit. He dug his fingernails into his palms.

He thought it might be true, actually. If he kept resisting this way it really might drive him insane.

Whatever. He didn’t feel all that sane anyhow. But he was going to have to do it right then, that moment. He was already wavering. It really _was_ a terrible idea...

He didn’t care. He told himself that he had made up his mind. He wasn’t going to be the Ripper. He wasn’t going to let himself be. And he was going to tell the Ripper so to his face – the only Ripper he knew, besides himself. He was going to tell Hannibal.

* * *

It took months to learn how to perform the Rite correctly, but the Ripper had already learned it. Will knew the words to say, the gestures, the way to shift himself into the correct mental state. He had turned off the lights in the shuttle, and he had lit a candle and was staring at a mirror and reciting ancient Trill. He felt ridiculous.

He’d been trying for half an hour. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to do it at all. He didn’t _want_ to do it – neither of him did. The Ripper didn’t want Will to fracture any more than he already had, and Will didn’t want to look at the Ripper. But he only had this one chance. He knew he would never allow himself to try this again.

He made himself remember being Hannibal, back before he’d been Will; back when Will had been Will Graham. He looked in the mirror, and he said the words, and nothing happened, and suddenly he was angry.

Hannibal had no right to hide from him, after what he’d done.

He glared at the mirror and imagined it shattering. He remembered being Hannibal. He said the words. He closed his eyes. And he teased Hannibal loose from the weave of his mind like a thread.

He took a moment to breathe before opening his eyes, because he knew what he was going to see.

When he opened them, Hannibal was standing behind him.

Will took another shuddering breath and turned to look at him, but then he had to look away. He thought he might cry.

He wasn’t really there, he only existed in Will’s mind, but Will could see him. He saw the image of Hannibal that he carried inside of him: the last thing that Will Graham had ever seen. Soft hair and severe clothes and flat, terrifying eyes.

Was he just imagining him that way, or was that really how he looked? But no, he didn’t look like anything anymore, he wasn’t _real-_

“I’m as real as you are.”

Will started, took a step back. He knew it was absurd. The Ripper wasn’t standing on the other side of the cabin, he was with Will, and there was no way for Will to walk away from him. He almost thought he could feel him inside, twitching and squirming.

Will flexed his hands to try to stop them from shaking. “Who are you?,” he asked. “Hannibal, or the Ripper?”

“There is no meaningful difference. I'm both. I’ve always been both, as long as you've known me.”

Hannibal. He might almost have been alive. The ghost of Hannibal, the memory of Hannibal, the alien thing inside him wearing Hannibal’s skin. Even his voice was the same. Will hadn’t heard it in – god, it had only been a couple of months.

“It’s risky to do this,” said Hannibal.

“I know."

“Then why did you?”

“When you’re inside my head, I can’t spit in your face.”

Hannibal’s eyes narrowed, and Will could feel him, he was angry – no – both of them were, Will was angry at the Ripper and the Ripper was angry at Will and it was echoing back and forth between them. Will was aware of what the Hannibal part of him was thinking and feeling, but it was fuzzy, off in the corner of his mental vision. As if it were something he were trying to ignore, a loud droning sound. He would remember it all later, though. That part was always confusing.

“You shouldn't have called me,” said Hannibal – the image that might have been Hannibal. “It will only confuse you. You’ve only decided to speak to me in order to prolong your delusion, but you know how this will end. You are delaying the inevitable and causing yourself unnecessary pain.”

“I’m causing _you_ pain. And every moment I spend resisting you is a personal victory.”

Hannibal took a step closer to Will. The muscles in Will’s neck tensed up, but he held his ground. He wasn’t going to run away from his own shadow. “I suppose,” said Hannibal, “that it’s easier to believe that I’m responsible for killing that woman than to accept that you are.”

“Sure is,” said Will. “You’re the one who’s doing this to me.”

“I'm not doing anything to you. All past hosts think with the host and feel with him, but the host is the one who chooses.”

“I chose to stay here and fight you.”

“And you chose to shoot Jack and run. You chose to kill that woman. You would stop, if you chose to. But I don’t take hosts who want to stop, and you are no exception.”

Of course he wanted to stop.

But... he didn’t need to ask what Hannibal meant by that. He could remember the way he’d watched Will Graham, the things Will Graham had said to him. The potential he’d shown. He’d been such a perfect candidate.

_I tried to kill my crewmate. And I liked it. I liked hurting her. That’s the part I really can’t stand to think about._

_So you came to find out what it looked like when I got inside somebody else’s head? Well, it looks like this, asshole._

_When you know for a fact that everyone feels justified, it makes the whole concept of right and wrong feel… arbitrary._

“Why torture yourself for the things you feel?,” Hannibal said. “You have nothing to gain from that.”

“You can tell me whatever bullshit you want,” Will said, “but I know why you took me. You just wanted the empathy. Shame you had to take me so soon. You didn't have time to finish _training_ me.”

Will did not feel even the slightest hint of guilt from him.

“Yes,” he said. “It's a shame.”

Will didn’t want to cry anymore. He wanted to scream. “You sat there across from me, and you let me believe you were _helping_ me.”

“I _was_ helping you. And I am still trying to help you, if you would only let me. What I want from you, I already have. What do you want from _me_?”

“You know what I wanted," said Will. "I wanted a friend. That’s sure as hell not what you are.”

“Of course I’m your friend. I didn’t do this to torture you. I gave you a gift, Will. I elevated you.”

“No,” Will said. “You killed me.”

The specter of Hannibal reached out to touch Will’s arm. Will jerked away from him, but his mind had tried to register the touch as if it were real, and for a second he felt the press of Hannibal’s fingers anyway.

“You were right,” he said. “This wasn't a good idea.”

He closed his eyes tight and said the words, and his minds touched, quivered, and collapsed into one like water droplets. And then he sank to his knees and gripped the carpet of the cabin floor with both hands. He stayed there that way for a long time.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [I am so damn sorry it took this long for me to update again. Life stuff was/is happening. But I couldn't wait to get back to this thing, and it is by no means abandoned. And shit is about to pop off. Love you all. Space Angst Forever.]

When he let go of the carpet, Will had rugburn on his fingers. He stood up slowly and leaned against the console to steady himself. He felt like he was leaning off the edge of a cliff.

It hadn’t worked at all.

Or, rather, it had worked just the way it was designed to. It hadn't fractured him any more than he was already fractured. And now, standing there with the Ripper swirling back into his mind, he realized that he should have known it wouldn’t work. They were too compatible. Too much the same person already to be completely split in two. He felt just the same as he had before.

Except it was much worse than before, because now he couldn’t tell himself that Hannibal was dead.

He’d let himself believe that the pieces of Hannibal left inside of him were nothing but copies of Hannibal’s memories. But he’d been thinking about it all wrong, because what that image in his head had told him was true: the Ripper had Hannibal’s memories because the Ripper _was_ Hannibal. They were one. When Hannibal had become the Ripper, the Ripper had become Hannibal, and the fact that he was Will now too didn’t mean that he wasn’t still Hannibal.

Will couldn’t think. He had to get out of that room. He put on his coat and stepped outside into the snow.

He could remember the way he’d felt during the rite. The other him. He remembered the way he’d seen Will standing across the room from him, the same way he’d been seen by Will – as a mirage, an image from inside his mind projected onto reality. And he remembered the things he’d thought.

Hannibal believed it all. That was the really terrifying thing. He had lied to Will about a hell of a lot of things, but he believed everything he’d said tonight. He believed that he had done what was best for Will. He believed that Will was a killer. He believed that Will was going to give in, and he believed that Will would be happier for it.

He believed that he had done all this to Will because he loved him.

For a moment, after he came back together, before he forced himself apart again, Will had believed those things, too.

 _Love._ What a bunch of bullshit. But that was how it felt.

He stayed outside in the snow until the cold was too much to stand, and then he came back into the shuttle and went to sleep.

* * *

He tried to go back to his routine after that. Every day he’d walk into the hideously noisy town and work his shift at the mechanic’s shop, and then he’d wander around and crowd himself with alien minds in the evening, and then he’d go home and comb through the data files looking for something, anything, that he could use to keep himself from giving in completely.

But as the weeks went on, he found himself spending more time in town after work, and going home later at night. Whenever he was alone, now, he had to think about the fact that he wasn’t alone at all. He had to think about Hannibal, and he didn’t want to.

But more than that, he was starting to wonder if the research was futile. In months of searching he had never found anything that could stop his merging with the Ripper, or reverse it. He knew he could slow it down – he  _had_ been slowing it down, he'd lasted five times longer than any of his other selves had, and he was still fighting. But maybe slowing it down was all he could do. And if it was, then he needed to spend as much time as he possibly could with anyone else’s mind but Hannibal’s inside his head.

It was a good theory. For a little while, he didn’t seem to be getting any worse. And then one day at work, he slipped.

Business was slow that day, and he was thinking about his stream. The one back on Trill that he’d copied in the holodeck, because he’d known he could never go back to Trill again. And now he could never go back to the one on the holodeck, either – the same place had been taken away from him twice. It was so goddamn unfair. But at least it still existed in his mind, so he decided to sketch it, and he picked up a pencil and a piece of paper.

Twenty minutes later, T'Akara walked by and smiled and said, “I didn’t know you could draw.”

Will stopped in the middle of a line and looked down at the pencil in his hand. He felt cold all over.

“Old habit,” he said quietly.

“Well, it’s really good!” she said, before disappearing into the back of the shop.

He looked down at the paper again. It _was_ good. Beautiful, even. He’d drawn it in late afternoon, with the light glinting off the water and casting long shadows from the trees.

So this was how it was going to happen.

He had been perfectly conscious. He’d known exactly what he was doing. He’d thought it would be nice to draw something, so he’d drawn something, and he had enjoyed doing it, and it had never crossed his mind that drawing wasn’t something he ought to know how to do.

He told himself not to panic. It wasn’t like he had hurt somebody. But he already knew that he was going to want to do it again, and he knew how he would justify it to himself then, if he even realized that he needed to justify it: there had been no harm in it, and he’d enjoyed it. He would tell himself that it wouldn’t be so bad to let himself have this one little thing, and then...

And then, when Will forgot that he was supposed to be fighting, the Ripper was going to seep into his mind so slowly that he wouldn’t even notice the moment when the two of them became one. How could he defend himself against that-?

Something slammed onto the counter he was leaning on. Flecks of melting snow landed on the paper. Will’s head jerked up.

There was a customer – he hadn’t heard him come in, or felt him. “Sorry,” he said. “I was-”

“I don’t give a shit,” said the man. Will saw that his hand was resting on a plasma injector. That was the thing he had slammed on the counter. “Just tell me if you can fix this fucking thing!”

How could Will not have felt him coming in? There were waves of contempt pulsing from him, contaminating the air. Will felt it seeping into him, and there was nowhere else to direct it but right back at the man, and he hated him.

“Let me have a look,” Will said. He picked up a hyperspanner and started trying to examine the injector, but his mind kept sliding off it. It was impossible to focus on anything but the feelings pulsing off the man in front of him. Nothing but cold loathing, not just for Will but for everything around him, the shop, the town, the planet, just everything. It wasn’t just a mood – Will could feel that he was like that all the time. How could he stand to live that way? Even secondhand it made Will want to smash the injector into bits on the countertop. It had been a long time since a person had spilled into him like this.

“Well?” the man said. “Can you fix it, or should I go find some other dump to drag it into?”

Will looked up at the man’s face again. He had no idea if he could fix it. He wasn’t even sure he could remember what it was called just then, because all he could think about was taking the broken pieces and shoving them down the man’s throat. He could watch him drown in his own blood. It would be slow. It wasn’t like it would be some huge loss to galactic society. He was scum. And he’d ruined the drawing.

Will swallowed. He needed him to leave. It was too vivid.  _I_ _t's just a thought,_ _it doesn’t mean..._ _“_ I can fix it,” he said. He still had no idea what was wrong with it. “It'll be a couple of days.”

The man glared at him. “Fine. Whatever. But I'm not paying any fucking deposit.”

Will took his information down and watched him walk out of the store. After half a minute he felt that mind fade out and blend with the noise of the town, and then he could breathe again.

T'Akara popped out of the back of the shop again. “What was that guy’s problem?” she asked.

Will’s eyes were still trained on the door. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just an asshole.”

* * *

He kept eyeing the plasma injector all afternoon. He wanted to fix it. He wanted to prove to himself that he could do his job, even if…

But whenever he looked at it, he imagined it bloody, and he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.

Why had that guy gotten to him that way? Why had he been so infuriating? Will had run into plenty of contemptuous assholes before, and that customer had been no worse than any of them. It wasn’t a big deal. He should just shrug it off. Will Graham would have shrugged it off.

But Will the Ripper needed him to die.

No one could blame the man he used to be. Everyone knew the way he’d been taken. Will Graham could stay innocent and dead, and Will could do what he liked. It would get easier, after. He remembered that from before. With the Ripper inside him it would only take a few kills before the guilt disappeared completely-

He slammed his right fist into a metal locker.

He cried out and collapsed against the counter, cradling the hand against his chest. The pain shot up his arm like a phaser blast. He had broken two bones in his hand.

T'Akara ran over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Holy hell,” she said. “What happened? Are you gonna be ok?"

“No,” Will said. _I’m really, really not._ “I, I think I have to go home.”

He gathered up his things and stumbled out of the shop and half-ran toward the edge of the town, holding the broken hand against his chest. It was starting to swell, and it was screamingly painful to touch it. He knew which bones were broken. Fourth and fifth metacarpal. He was furious that he knew it.

It would be easy to heal. He had the replicator file for an osteostimulator, he could fix it inside of five minutes. He knew exactly how to do it, because Hannibal knew.

As he trudged through the snow toward the shuttle, he thought about leaving it broken. Just sitting on the bed and letting it hurt them. He hated Hannibal that much just then. But it was his hand, too, and he couldn’t do that to himself. There was a limit to the amount of torture he was willing to take.

_That’s why I’m going to lose._


	17. Chapter 17

Will didn’t go to work the next day, or the day after that. Or the day after that. He couldn’t face going back there. That man might come back, and he didn’t know what would happen then. And he didn’t want to look at the dent he’d made in the locker.

He didn’t know what to do with himself without the structure of the job, though. He hadn’t skipped a day of work since he’d been hired. He spent those three days grabbing snatches of sleep before bad dreams woke him up again, and then he’d pour himself back into the research or get himself drunk or take long walks in the cold, and he’d try not to think about what that man deserved. He pretended he couldn’t hear the sound of his bones cracking under his boot heels. A perfect snap. Like breaking a carrot in half with his hands.

He would have to go back to town eventually. He couldn’t let himself keep hearing those sounds, and he knew he could only drown them out with other peoples’ minds. But he didn’t know if it would be more dangerous to stay in the shuttle or to go back to where the people were. In the shuttle he couldn’t hurt anyone but himself.

But then one night Will dreamed that Hannibal was watching him. It wasn’t one of those dreams of the things Hannibal had done to his victims, or of what he’d done to Will – he was used to those dreams. They were only memories. But in this dream Hannibal only stood there, not moving, not speaking. Just watching him. Watching and waiting.

Will gasped himself awake, and for a moment he thought he could still see him there, standing over him in the sleeping berth. He got up and threw on his coat and left the shuttle.

He had stayed away too long already. Even after just a couple of days, it was hard to force himself to walk into the din of the town. But he needed those other feelings in his mind before his own feelings took him over. He opened his mind up to the flood, the way Hannibal had taught him, and he kept walking.

It was a few hours before sunrise, and more people were asleep than awake. Will could feel the feelings from their dreams, quieter than waking peoples’ feelings but more intense, heightened. Things happened in dreams that couldn’t happen in real life. You could have anything you wanted in a dream, or you could lose everything you had. You could even die.

Will let himself float on all those dreams and nightmares as he walked through the empty streets. It had snowed that night, and there had been hardly anyone around to trample it into slush yet. The light reflecting off the whiteness made the whole town gleam in a way that it never did during the day. He wandered around aimlessly for an hour or so and looked at the snow and let the dreams flow through his head until they began to hurt him, and then he headed for the mechanic’s shop.

It wasn’t until the door scanned him and slid open that he admitted to himself why he had come there.

He stopped and stood on the threshold of the darkened shop with his blood pounding in his ears.

The man’s address was in the shop’s computer.

He made fists to steady his suddenly shaking hands. All he had to do was walk across the room and this would all be over. Once he had the address in his hand he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, and then he would be free. He could be satisfied with knowing that he’d tried and failed, and he could leave this awful place and be whole again.

He could just walk across the room and take his life back.

He wanted to. He wanted to show the man his own intestines before he killed him, he wanted to replace the hideous pollution of his mind with pure crystalline terror and then erase it completely. It would be easy. It had been such a long time. He thought he could feel black vines twining around him, pulling him forward toward the computer. He didn’t move. He didn’t know why he didn’t move. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to.

He stepped backward, out of the doorway, into the street. The door whirred shut in front of him.

He shouldn’t. Why shouldn’t he?

He backed away from the door until he bumped into the building across the road.

_Sad fucking martyr. Fighting a losing battle that no one will ever know about or give you credit for._

He ran.

He wanted to turn around. He wanted those black vines to drag him back there, he wanted to have no choice. He wanted to be weak. He thought he could see blood on the walls rushing past him. He thought he could feel the vines twisting around his feet, pulling him backward, toward the shop, toward the computer, toward the man…

In that moment there was only one place he could think of to run to. There was a fighting pit at the edge of town – illegal, like a lot of things on Daphne IV, and well hidden, but most nights it overflowed with the screaming minds of spectators and the focused violence of the fighters. It was a place he had always made sure to avoid before. The feelings it poured into him were too much like the feelings he'd been trying to repress. But just then, it was the only thing he could think of that might come close to satisfying him. He needed to feel the way it felt to do that violence. Or else he was going to go and do some violence of his own.

It was in a low brick building that looked abandoned. No one else but Will would have ever known it was there. There was nothing to see, there were no sounds. Just the violence. Will sat down in the alley next to the building and leaned his head back against the bricks and wrapped his arms around his knees. He let it pound into him. Victory, fear, elation. Pain and brutality and delirium. He was trembling.

He knew he’d never have been able to stand something like this when he’d first come to the planet. It would have been torture. But he was adapting. He was getting used to even the most deafening noise, and the noise was the only thing that had ever been able to stop him.

He’d known it might not work forever.

He sat there until dawn and felt the feelings, and he didn’t get up and go back to the shop. He didn’t need to. It made him feel cleaner, to feel that power pulsing through him. It quieted his mind. It felt like water to a man dying in the desert. He was past the point where that would have horrified him. Now he was only glad that it had been enough. Enough for one night, at least.

At sunrise he stood up and headed back to the shuttle. There was someone he needed to scream at.

* * *

He said the words to call Hannibal out the moment he got back. He knew there was nothing it could possibly accomplish, except to give him a place to vent his rage, but he did it anyway.

He looked so real. It was hard to believe that he was an illusion, that he wasn’t the person Will Graham had known. That the thing that was Hannibal now was curled up inside him like a parasite.

The image of Hannibal said, “You should have killed him.”

Will snatched an empty glass from the top of the console and hurled it at him. It passed through him like he wasn't even there, because he wasn't, and it smashed on the bulkhead behind him.

“Go to hell!”

Hannibal didn’t say a word, so Will grabbed the bottle and threw that at him too. After it shattered the shuttle smelled like whiskey.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Hannibal. “You're going to cut your feet.”

“ _Your_ feet, don't you mean? You fucking bastard. I should stomp on it for you.”

“Your feet. And mine. There isn’t any difference. This is who you are, who _we_ are.”

“No,” Will said. “No. There’s no we here. You’re not me.”

“Of course I am,” said Hannibal. “You know what joining means. You're not keeping some foreign invader out of your brain, you're trying to rip your own soul in two. Can't you see why that’s a fool’s errand? Will, you are lying to yourself.”

“So what? It's working.”

“Clearly it isn't working as well as you'd like.”

“It’s working _fine_ ,” Will said. He didn’t know why he was bothering to lie – they had both been there. They both knew what he’d almost done. “No one else has ever lasted this long.”

“No, no one has. It isn't even close. And all you are doing by lasting so long is wasting time.”

“I’m wasting _your_ time,” Will said, “all of your time. I’m going to stay on this planet for the rest of my life and you’re going to die with me.”

“This is no life at all,” said Hannibal. “You might as well just kill us now and save yourself the trouble. But you won’t. You haven’t even tried to. And if you really intended to stay here for the rest of your life you would have disabled the shuttle.”

Will couldn’t speak. He felt that chill again, the one he’d felt when he’d looked at his drawing. It had never even crossed his mind to disable the shuttle, but he should have. And if Hannibal knew that he should have, then Will had known it too.

“I don't want you to be here,” said Hannibal. “Trapped on this miserable planet like a dog on a chain. Engage the thrusters and take yourself away from here. Once you let yourself escape you'll never have to suffer like this again. Everything you feel now, the guilt and disgust and anger, all of that will vanish. You’ll be _happy_ , Will. You know that I’m not lying to you. You remember.”

God, he wanted to. “What,” Will said, “so just shove a knife in somebody's guts and I'll be free?”

Will could feel a pulse of desperate frustration from him. “You are free already.”

“No. I’ll never be free again, you saw to that.”

“Why did you call on me, really?” said Hannibal. “Just to tell yourself again that you’re not me, despite what you did tonight? You are. You know that you are. I can see in your mind that you know, and you knew that this wouldn’t be able to change that.” He paused. Will felt like he had felt when he’d seen him in the dream. “I think you just wanted to look at me.”

He hadn’t wanted to. Or... he hadn’t wanted to want to. He didn’t want to think about Hannibal anymore. He didn’t want to remember what Hannibal had been to him, before he’d known what he was. And he didn’t want to remember what Will Graham had been to him, either; the way Will Graham had ensnared him. He had never intended to care for him that way.

“You know,” Will said, his voice breaking, “it would have been a lot kinder if you’d just taken me the day you met me.”

“Will. All I want is to open your eyes to the truth of who you are. Someday soon you'll wonder why you ever did this to yourself.”

Will felt tears spring into his eyes. He struggled to control the expression on his face, not that it mattered. Hannibal could feel everything he was feeling.

“I know,” he whispered.

They just looked at each other then. Will felt Hannibal’s sadness for him, his sympathy. And his total lack of guilt. He couldn’t stand it. He took a few shaking breaths. “Go away,” he said. “Just go away.”

Will said the words to make Hannibal disappear, and then he sat down in the sleeping berth and put his head in his hands.


	18. Chapter 18

Will forced himself back into town that afternoon, and he didn’t go back to the shuttle that night. There was a big rooming house he knew of – he’d noticed it before on his trips around town, and sometimes he’d stop by and lean against some nearby building and listen to it for an hour or two. It was the kind of place with high turnover, where people stayed for a few days or weeks between jobs on the cargo ships, so it always felt new.

The clerk at the front desk gave him an unfriendly glance when he walked in, and he asked for payment up front. Probably that was standard, people probably tried to skip out on their bills all the time here, but Will thought he noticed the man looking at his eyes. Typical. Out here in deep space people didn’t always trust Betazoids – they figured anybody who could read your feelings or your thoughts could easily grift you or rob you blind.

The clerk asked Will how long he’d be staying. Will hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he needed to get away from the guy before he decided that he should die for thinking those things, so he paid him for three months and tried not to bolt for the stairs.

Halfway up the stairwell he suddenly felt his stomach churn. He stopped and gripped the railing with both hands. Three months. Why had he said three months? Could he really think he had that little time left?

Could he really have that much?

He was done pretending. He couldn’t keep telling himself that he was going to resist his urges forever. But every day he felt those urges and denied them, he was saving a life. It still mattered. Even if he gave in tomorrow, it would still have mattered that he hadn’t given in today. He wasn’t going to just roll over like the dog Hannibal had compared him to, back in the shuttle that morning.

Hannibal. God, he had been so stupid. He should never have given the Ripper Hannibal’s face. If he’d needed to talk to the Ripper he could have picked any of them. Mischa, Bedelia, any part of himself but Hannibal. He had made things worse, not better. Now he felt like he knew the new self that was waiting around the corner. It would have been easier if he’d been able to pretend it was a stranger.

He could hear a hundred thousand feelings from the tenants and the town outside, clanging and blaring at him, as he walked the rest of the way to his room. He unlocked the door and threw his bag in the corner and sat down on the bed, and then he opened himself up and tried to let those feelings smother him. It didn’t work as well as he wished it would. When he’d first come to the planet, the town had made it so that he couldn’t feel his own feelings at all. He could feel them now. Not clearly, not all that strongly, but he could feel them.

Mostly what he felt was that he wanted to be free. Free of the guilt, free of the cage. He had been able to hide those feelings from himself under the weight of the town for this long, but the more he adapted to the noise in his head, the harder it got to tell himself that he had to keep resisting. Just three days in the shuttle, away from the blurring, muffling power of those thousands of minds, had almost been enough to break his resolve.

When the planet stopped working altogether, it wouldn’t be more than a couple of days before he came up with some excuse for why he was justified. Reasons they deserved to die. Reasons he deserved to kill them. He wished he could cut out the part of his soul that couldn’t wait for that to happen.

* * *

He didn’t sleep at all that night, but he hadn’t really expected to. It was like trying to sleep with fifty different orchestras playing inside his room. He gave up trying after nine or ten hours, and then he went out and started walking around, visiting the best places he knew of to blot his feelings out. There was the densest block of apartment buildings near the center of town. The ports, for the constant flow of alien ships with strange minds he had never felt before. The hospital – that one was still hard. There were all kinds of grief and pain for him to borrow there. And after dark, there were bars and clubs crammed full of amplified drunken emotion, and the fighting pits he’d run away to last night.

By the end of the day he had worn himself down past the point of stability – he was vulnerable to every passing feeling from the crowd around him, and as he walked back to his room he could feel himself flickering at random through shades of every emotion he could name. He was dizzy and anxious and exhausted, and the pain in his head had started to creep back.

But all of that was nothing – those places he had visited didn’t have nearly the power over him that they used to have. He had been right in the center of town for more than a day, and he still knew who he was. And what he wanted.

That night he was able to sleep a little, and then the next day he got up and did it again, and the day after that. Each day it got worse, or better – he was more exhausted, more swirlingly confused, the mounting pain in his head made it harder and harder to focus, but each day he managed to lose himself a little more. There were a few moments on the third or fourth day when the last barriers between him and the world started to bleed through, and he forgot who he was and what he felt completely.

Even though Will knew that they weren’t going to last all that much longer, those moments felt like victories.

The problem with pushing himself right up to the limit of what he could take was that eventually, he pushed himself over. In the middle of the night after that forth day, he woke up with such hideous pain lancing through his mind that he forgot why he was there, and then he remembered and he didn’t care, if he lost much more of his control than this then the whole planet might smash right down through him to the base of his skull, it might even kill him-

He threw on his coat and ran for the shuttle. Probably he was so scrambled up now that he could risk one night’s sleep there. And if he was lying to himself about that, it didn’t really matter, because there was no way in hell he was going to stay therein town that night.

He woke upfeeling hungover and used-up and achy, and the first thing that crossed his mind was that Hannibal had been right. He should stay here in the shuttle. He should turn the thrusters on and go. He should end this charade a few days or weeks or months ahead of schedule, because it wouldn’t make any real difference if he did.

He was probably right. He probably should. But he wasn’t going to.

He was going to make the Ripper pay for every inch of ground it took, and the part of him that wanted to be the Ripper could just wait its damned turn.

* * *

He didn’t know how many more times he did it – stayed in town until he couldn’t take it anymore, fled to the shuttle, forced himself back. Every time he came back to town it got easier to be there, and every time he woke up in the shuttle it got harder to leave it again.

One night near the middle of one of those cycles, when he was faded and blurring but still basically sane, he went to a loud, busy club near the largest spaceport, because he knew he could get a drink there and because it was overflowing with feelings. They were the drunk kind of feelings that veered between extremes so quickly that they could still sometimes overwhelm him. All those late-night bar feelings – dizzy pointless happiness and self-pity and desire.

He wished he had gone somewhere else. Sometimes places like this were exactly what he needed to hide his mind from himself, but tonight those feelings grated on him. It felt as if the whole club was mocking him. He couldn't keep from resenting the happiness, and he had more than enough self-pity inside him already, and as for the last thing… well. That was what had gotten him here in the first place.

It was no good. He wasn’t going to get what he needed here tonight. He was just going to get angry, and the whole point of being here was to stop himself from feeling anything of his own at all. He could go back to the fighting pits, maybe. That always worked, even when the other places didn’t.

He picked up his most recent drink from the sticky bar so that he could finish it and get the hell out of there. And as he did, his eyes happened to fall on something he hadn’t seen in months, except for those times when he’d conjured them up in his mind.

Trill spots. One of the men in this bar was Trill.

He felt irrationally afraid. The man was going to know somehow. He was going to zero in on Will and see that he was joined, even though he shouldn't be, even though he didn't look Trill anymore; and every Trill in the galaxy would have heard about the murderous joined Trill with the solid black eyes by now, and then he would realize, and then-

And then Will realized that he'd looked too long, because the man met his eyes and smiled at him and started walking over.

Fuck.

Will tried to look back down at his drink but he knew it was pointless. It was too late to pretend that he hadn’t been staring. And from the look the man had given him, he knew exactly what he was going to say when he came over.

His energy was simple to pick out of the crowd – cheerful and oblivious, laid-back, carefree, irresponsible. And drunk, of course. Will had met plenty of people like him before. His type of mind had irritated Will even before he’d been joined.

He leaned against the bar next to Will in a ridiculously faux-casual pose and smiled and said, “Isn't this place awful?”

“I’m not interested.”

He flashed Will a playful smile. He wasn’t going to make it that easy, apparently. “And who says _I_ am? I only wanted to come meet the man who's been staring at me from across the room.” He held out his hand. “Anthony Dimmond.”

Will didn’t shake his hand. “James T. Kirk,” he muttered.

Dimmond laughed. Will felt a bright flash of desire from him them. It reminded him of the last time he’d felt those feelings himself, and he didn’t want to remember that.

“Fine, don't tell me,” he said. “So, _Jim –_ since you _aren't_ interested, why were you staring?”

“No reason,” Will said. “I just don't see too many Trill around here.”

“Is that so? Interesting that you noticed. Have you spent much time on Trill?”

He didn’t mean the planet. “Cute,” Will said.

“Well,” said Dimmond, “if-”

Will cut him off. “Listen. I can feel what you're going to say before you say it, so don't bother.”

“Oh?” Another smile. “And what am I going to say?”

God. Take the hint already. He should just go ahead and tell the guy to fuck off and leave him alone.

He wasn’t sure why he didn’t.

Maybe he hadn’t realized how homesick talking to another Trill would make him feel. Or maybe it was just nice that someone wanted to talk to him at all.

Or maybe the walls between him and the world were getting thin again, and the feelings from this man were bleeding in, mixing into him, blotting him out…

And hadn’t that been the whole point of coming here?

Will toyed with his drinking glass, rolling the bottom edge slowly back and forth on the bar, watching it sparkle in the dim light.

“You’re going to say, ‘let’s get out of here,’” he said.

“You’re good,” said Dimmond.

He had such a transparently simple mind. Totally untroubled. Never thinking any farther ahead than his next spaceport and his next drink and his next lay.

It might be nice to borrow those feelings for a little while.

He didn’t realize how drunk he was until they stepped out of the bar and the frigid air hit him. He felt the swirly confusion of his drunkenness piled on top of the confusion from all the other feelings in the air around him.

It was a bad idea. He had known it was a bad idea the second he’d said it and now he was drunk and floaty and suggestible, he didn’t know why he’d said yes, he didn’t even know this guy – and besides, he was dangerous, it wasn’t even safe to be near him and now he was taking someone back home – he’d been planning on going to the pits again, hadn’t he, he should ditch this guy and go there now, what the hell was he even _doing-_

Then Dimmond pulled him into a narrow alley and kissed him, confident and careless and slow, and that desire Will had felt him feel in the bar was pouring from him now. It would have been impossible for Will to shut those feelings out completely. If he decided to leave right now, they would fade out in a little while, but he only had a little time left to decide before rational thought went straight out the window.

A bad idea. But his mind felt so clear, and he was beautiful, and he was Trill – the spots lining his face and his neck looked like home, they looked like the time before he’d come here, before he’d been joined, before he’d been miserable…

He wanted to see what those spots looked like further down.

He grabbed Dimmond’s hand and pulled him out of the alley toward his rented room.

* * *

The ancient bedframe creaked as Will pushed Dimmond down onto the bed, feeling the surging high of his desire, not sure anymore that all of those feelings were borrowed. They had lost their shirts somehow, he thought he remembered that part – they had come off with the coats and gloves and boots after the two of them had stumbled into the room.

Will climbed on top of him and kissed him again, deeply, letting the warmth of his body soak into his skin. He ran his hand slowly up his chest, up the side of his neck, it was so good to feel those spots under his hands again, to tangle his fingers in that thick dark hair-

A bolt of awful recognition shot through the lust.

Will gasped and scrambled backward on the bed.

“You, I, I need you to leave.”

A pulse of Dimmond’s feelings. Startled, confused, just slightly offended. He tried to put on that same flirtatious voice he’d used before. “But we're only just getting started, darling-”

“Just leave, please, now, please just leave!”

Baffled, disappointed. Irritated. He got up and threw on his shirt and grabbed his coat and left. His mind faded and blended with all the others as he walked away. Will sat on the edge of the bed and felt him leave.

He knew why he had brought him home.

Thick dark hair, pale skin, Trill spots. Same age, same build. And his dark eyes – in the dim light of the bar they had looked almost black.

He had taken him home because he looked like Will Graham.

It was too much to hold in his mind all at once. He felt a horrible sense of vertigo, he was spinning, delirious. Will Graham. His Will. Of course, of course he had wanted that man.

Hannibal had been there in his mind the whole time, he had been watching – no – he had been _doing_ , he had done all of those things that Will had done. They had done them together. They had gone to the bar together and found that man together, brought him home together, touched him together...

And Hannibal was standing there in the room across from the bed.

Will didn’t remember saying the words to make him emerge. Maybe he hadn’t said them at all – maybe he didn’t need to anymore, maybe all he had to do now was conjure the image of Hannibal up in his mind.

He could see Will more clearly than he had seen him before. The other times he’d split himself this way, he had stared a vision of Hannibal down and seen a vision of Will out of the corner of his eye. It wasn’t like that now. He was Will – still more Will than anyone else – but he was Hannibal, too, more Hannibal than he had been since before he’d died, before the confusion of waking up as Will and the slow torture of being on this planet.

He could see both of his selves at once, gazing across the room at each other, each of them knowing what the other one knew.

Will had no idea what to say. There was no point in saying anything.

Finally he ran his fingers through his hair and stared up at the ceiling so that he didn’t have to look at him and said, “I keep thinking you're going to run out of new ways to ruin my life.”

There was a blast of emotion, frustration/anger/sadness/longing and some other things he couldn’t quite grasp, all too splintered for him to feel coherently, pulsing up through the drunkenness. Those feelings were not split in two. Will felt them all. Hannibal felt them all.

There was a pointless question that he already knew the answer to. He asked it anyway.

“Why would you do that to me, why would you make me want him?”

“I didn't make you want him, Will. You just wanted him.”

He had. He _had_ wanted him, and he’d had no idea, neither of him had, they hadn’t expected anything more from him than a brief meaningless distraction. That man had been meant to be a way to hide from this.

“Right,” Will said. “Because _you_ wanted him, because I'm _you._ ” There was a feeling between them that belonged only to Will now, a deep, savage bitterness. “Because you want Will. Well. Too bad for us, I guess. We can't have him. He’s gone. You erased him. You couldn't just fucking leave him alone, and now he's dead. And so are you.”

He didn't want to feel the wisps of misery that came floating up through the anger when he said those last few words. He told himself that those feelings belonged to Hannibal.

Hannibal wasn’t standing across the room anymore, he was sitting on the bed – Will hadn’t seen him move, and he thought that maybe he hadn’t moved at all, because of course he didn’t need to. He wasn’t real.

But his hand on Will’s arm felt as warm and solid as if he were really there.

“I’m not dead, Will,” he said. “And neither is he. And neither are you, for that matter, despite this tomb you’ve locked yourself in.” Desperation. He needed Will to understand. “We're all here in this room,” he said. “All three of us. You and he and I, we’re all alive. We all exist in the Ripper.”

Will pulled his arm away. “Don't say that name.”

“Do you think that not hearing your name will make you forget who you are?”

Sadness and regret and rage and need and delirium-

He had managed not to cry the first two times he’d brought him out. He was crying now. There was no point in hiding it. There was no one but him in the room to see it.

The spectral Hannibal reached out and brushed the hair from Will’s eyes. But couldn’t have, it was impossible; he could make Will feel the ghost of his hand on his skin but he couldn’t really touch him, he had no form to touch him with. He thought that maybe he had used Will’s hand to brush Will’s hair away, or else maybe there had been no real hair in his eyes at all, only in the eyes of the spectral Will that Hannibal saw. He had no way of knowing.

He thought he could hear Will’s voice coming from Hannibal’s mouth; or maybe it was the other way around; or maybe he hadn’t heard anything at all, maybe he was just confused...

_If I’m you, then you’re me. You understand why I can’t stop fighting you._

He didn't know which specter of himself he was saying those words to. He didn’t know which one of him was saying them.

_You want to crush me down to nothing but it isn’t going to work. I’m part of you now. You can’t change who I am._

He was melding and shifting, pieces of him floating up and sinking down again. He was two people and three people and one and fifteen, blurring and sharpening and blurring again – he was Hannibal and Will, he was the Ripper, he was Bedelia and Mischa and Abel and all the rest of them, and he was none of them, he was only himself, and then he was Will and Hannibal again, and Will and Hannibal were sitting there beside him…

It was beginning to feel like that first time they had merged – that one time before the joining, the one night and one morning before they had been torn down and remade into what they were now. The one time before Will had known enough to be terrified, and the tangle of their minds had only felt beautiful.

He couldn’t remember anymore which one of his bodies was spectral and which was real. He felt a hand press against his heart, and he didn’t know whose hand it was, and he didn’t know whose skin it was that felt hot and soft underneath his fingers. He brushed a kiss against someone's neck, and he felt his own mouth move down his throat, his collarbone, his chest – there were hands, he could feel them everywhere, some solid and some imaginary, all of them blistering with need – his mind was tossing and rolling in the waves, the room was falling away around him, his heart was pounding out of his chest-

He felt someone wrap his arms around him and pull him down onto the bed.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [tw: violence and self-harm]

He was aware of the pain in his head before he knew he was awake, but that was nothing new. First the pain, then the warmth of the covers and the cold of the air on his face, then the maddening hum of feelings all around him, like always; and then he realized that he wasn’t exactly sure who he was.

Will. He was Will, wasn’t he? His body was Will’s body, he could tell that much. And he was alone, he couldn’t see anyone else in the room with him. He thought he must have faded back together when he'd fallen asleep.

He forced himself to sit up, and he looked in the mirror. He wished he hadn’t. It was too much, it was almost as bad as when he’d woken up that first time, that horrible confusion – the two versions of last night were clanging around in his head, and he remembered them both with perfect clarity. Too perfect. It couldn’t have been real, it couldn’t have happened that way. He couldn’t have been in this body and seen this face at the same time, and done all of those things he remembered doing.

Had he known what would happen, when he’d called Hannibal out? He didn’t know. He thought that he might have. He thought that sooner or later he was going to do it again.

He could call him up right now, if he wanted to. Maybe it would make everything less confusing, and then they could-

He knew exactly why it was a bad idea, so he crushed it down. He wondered how long it would be until he changed his mind.

It was impossible to sort the confusion between his selves from the confusion flowing into him from outside. He had to get away from the town. At least he might be able to think, then. He swung himself out of bed and pulled on his clothes, and he remembered the man from the bar who had pulled some of those clothes off his body. He couldn’t remember his name. It was hard to believe that he had ever existed. He didn’t seem real. Not the way Will and Hannibal had.

He found his way downstairs somehow and stepped unsteadily out of the rooming house. The wind whipped the fallen snow at him and woke him up a little. It was a few hours before dawn, and he couldn’t see anyone else on the street.

The cold stung his face but he barely registered it. Everything he could see looked familiar to him, but didn’t know how to comprehend what he was seeing. It felt like hearing someone speak a foreign language with his own language mixed in, and then straining to make sense of words he could only half understand. The blowing snow was beautiful and mundane all at once. The buildings around him looked like safety and like a prison he’d been thrown into. The other minds were creeping into him more and more, obscuring himself from himself, the way they were supposed to, and he didn’t want them to – or he did, maybe, he wasn’t sure...

He should go to the shuttle and fly away from here. Or, no, he should go to the fighting pits and blot that thought out of his mind, or he should go back to the safety of his room; or he should go find that man who had come into the mechanic’s shop and kill him…

 _no,_ _no, I don’t want that, that’s not me, it’s him, he’s lying-_

He felt himself spinning off into delirium again. He ducked into an alley and leaned on one arm against the wall to steady himself.

 _he’s dead,_ _he isn’t me,_ _he isn’t real, he’s just memories, he’s DEAD-_

He must have looked drunk, leaning there.

That was what he thought, later, when he pieced it all together again.

The cold from the wall seeped in through his sleeve. He shut his eyes against the glare of the snow on the ground. He heard some sound but it was only in his head. It sounded almost like a voice, someone speaking to him. He thought it might be real, actually, but he couldn’t process the words. That was fine. It couldn’t be important. No one ever talked to him about anything important. He decided to ignore it, and focus on trying to make his head stop spinning.

_“...are you…”_

“ _...hey, are...”_

“ _...your...”_

But the voice wasn’t going to stop. Will took a steadying breath and turned around to see if he could find out where it was coming from and make it go away and then-

a phaser-

there was a phaser, a _phaser_ , it was pointed at his chest-

“Are you fucking _deaf?_ I said drop your money on the ground!”

There was a human behind the phaser. Will stared at him. He could only just barely understand what was happening.

“You… are, are you mugging me?”

A rush of emotion invaded him – the human was anxious, afraid, exhilarated. He looked young. He wasn’t quite holding his phaser hand steady. Probably he hadn't done this too many times before.

“Just drop the goddamn money and get out of here!”

Will felt paralyzed. His confusion, the man’s mounting hysteria, the thousands of feelings pounding into him from other peoples’ dreams-

Anger was seeping into the human’s tumult of emotion now. He raised the phaser and pointed it at Will’s face, and Will remembered to be afraid. He couldn’t breathe. He thought that he could hear his own heart hammering in his chest.

With a shaking voice the human said, “Think I won't do it?”

There was a breach in the hull of Will’s mind, and the vacuum rushed in.

The rational thing would be to do what he said. It wouldn’t matter. Will didn't need the money. The guy would be gone in ten seconds if he just cooperated. He didn't look like the type to shoot him in the back after robbing him.

Will knew that all those things were true.

But.

But it was like some benevolent god had come down from heaven to give him his excuse.

He looked up from the phaser into the man’s eyes.

“You won’t,” he said.

Will felt the anger surge in the man’s mind an instant before his fingers twitched to the trigger, and he dodged to the side and heard the sizzle of the beam as it scorched the wall of the alley. He grabbed the man’s arm and wrenched it sideways, and he slammed him against the wall. The man screamed and dropped the phaser, and his arm fell limp in Will’s hands – he must have popped it out of its socket.

Will seized him by the shoulders and threw him to the ground. He kicked the phaser out of reach. He could have picked it up. He didn’t want to.

He had to stop. He had promised himself.

It couldn’t all have been for nothing.

He threw himself on top of the man and straddled him and slammed his fist into his face.

The shock of the pain pierced his mind like a spear – not the pain itself but the feeling that the pain inspired, the frantic animal need to run, hide, the blinding panic, the dark surging fear.

Fear of _him._

Before Hannibal he would have screamed along with the man as that fear and panic crashed against him; now he made a channel through his mind and let those feelings pour through it.

He would hate himself later. He hated himself now. But the benefits of stopping were so abstract compared to the sick satisfaction of his rage. He couldn’t have stopped it any more than he could have ripped a scab off a wound and then tried to put it back on again.

He struck the man’s face again and he reeled with him, they gasped and shook together; he was soaring, giddy, high.

He looked into the man’s eyes and saw his own power reflected there.

He brought both hands to the man’s throat and began to choke him, and he watched those eyes grow wide, felt his body thrash underneath him, felt him begin to understand that he would lose. He could kill him this way, or he could pick up the phaser after all, or he could bash his head against the ground. There were so many ways.

It didn’t feel like losing control. It felt like taking it. It felt – god it felt _fair_. It felt like the first fair thing that had happened to him in his life.

It felt like taking every single unbearable thing that he had ever had to bear anyway, every injustice, every frustration, every hideous thought that had ever polluted his mind, and turning them all into glass and smashing them with a hammer.

He let go of the man’s throat and heard his ragged gasp and felt a throb of desperate hope.

He cracked his fist against his face again.

Something in his head was broken now. No, not _something_. He was a surgeon, he knew the name. The orbital plate. Another blow like that and it would all be finished.

He could taste the victory already. He knew what it would taste like, he remembered, that beautiful release – he would see the man transform into a quiet body as the spark left him, and this time he would get to feel it as it rushed away into the void-

Those thoughts flashed through his mind as he raised his fist for the final blow, and in that moment he realized whose victory it would be.

But it was too late, too late, he needed to, he _wanted_ to, he couldn’t force this glorious satisfying rage back inside himself now and he was going to throw it all away-

_no-_

_no, NO-_

And in that last lucid instant he had left to him, he did the only thing he could find the strength to do before he let the Ripper win.

With wild desperation he turned that savage violence on himself, and he ripped down the iron walls at the bottom of his mind, the ones that had been there since he was ten years old, the ones that kept him sane.

Every last scrap of every last person in the entire world screamed into him.

He didn't remember anything after that.

* * *

When he woke up he was alone. He could taste the blood in his throat from screaming.

He was surprised to be alive. He’d assumed that the world would have scrambled his mind past the point of recovery. But apparently he couldn’t keep those barriers down for long, they must be instinctive by now – they must have sprung back up the moment he'd passed out, or he wouldn’t have woken up again.

He sat up slowly and gasped as a sudden sharp pain stabbed through his chest. His ribs were cracked. Someone had kicked him in the side. It might have been the human, or it might have been someone else, there was no telling on a planet like this one. Whoever it was, it looked as if they had rifled through his pockets too, because his money was gone after all. Some part of him wanted to laugh at that.

It must have been hours, at least. He could see low morning sunlight slanting through the cracks between the buildings across the street, and he was covered in a thin layer of dry snow. It had erased the stains of blood on the ground as if they had never been there at all.

But they had.

He had been trying and trying to tell himself that he was Will, just Will; that Will was the one of him who acted, with the Ripper living inside him and watching him and whispering in his ear. Or in the darker moments, when he was on the verge of giving up, he had told himself that it was the other way around, that the Ripper was just dragging him along for the ride as he stood back helplessly and pounded on the walls of his prison.

Thinking of it that way had worked, for a while. It had kept him apart. It had let him imagine that somehow there might be such a thing as winning.

He had always known it was a lie.

It hadn’t just been Will’s symbiont who had felt like a god as he bathed himself in that man’s terror. It had been Will. Will, and Hannibal, and all the rest of him.

He dragged himself up off the ground, gripping his side against the pain in his ribs, and he headed slowly out of the town toward the shuttle.

* * *

It took him hours, maybe. He wasn’t sure. A long time, anyway.

He tried not to think. He tried to focus on nothing but the sound of his feet crunching through the snow, and the pain, and the chaos of the alien feelings in his mind, bearable now but still overwhelming. But he couldn’t stop remembering. What he had done; the way it had felt; the thrill and the righteousness of it.

It wasn’t until he opened the shuttle door that the exhaustion took him. He stumbled inside and sank to his hands and knees on the rough carpet without even taking the time to close the door against the cold. His arms trembled with the effort of supporting his aching body.

He saw flashes of light on the cabin floor. He willed his eyes to focus on them. The sun was glinting off the glass from the bottle he had thrown at Hannibal, on that night when he’d almost killed the man from the shop. He remembered the way it had passed through Hannibal harmlessly, all of Will’s effort and rage unable to make a single mark on him.

He had known it wouldn’t hurt him, but he had done it anyway, just as he had done everything else he’d done since he had come here. He had known he would fail. But he’d had to try. He was still Will, too – Will and the Ripper.

He remembered what they had thought last night, each of them to the other. _If I'm you, then you're me._

_You understand why I can’t stop fighting you._

But the fight was almost over.

There was only one more thing he could think of to try.

He pulled himself up to his knees, and he picked up a shard of the broken glass.

If the Ripper couldn’t stop himself, then he couldn’t let himself be the Ripper anymore.

He opened his coat and lifted the hem of his shirt with a shaking hand. The edge of the glass found the place above his navel where the Ripper lived. It hung there, vibrating with static energy, daring him.

He would die, both of him. But when he died he would die as Will Graham.

He took a deep breath and pressed the glass into his skin and began to drag it across his stomach.

Burning pain arced through him as the muscles parted. He grasped at all the willpower he had left inside him and kept cutting. Hot blood throbbed from the wound onto his hand and flowed down his thighs and pooled below him on the floor. Three inches, four, five…

He hurled the blood-slick glass across the cabin. He collapsed face-down on the floor, weak and in pain and horribly alive.

So that was that, then. It really was too late. He couldn’t let himself do it. He wanted too much to live.

And each of him loved his other self too much to kill him.

They were one. Will couldn’t kill the Ripper, and the Ripper would never let Will go. Never let him go, never let him die, and then one day he would take a new host, and the part of Will that couldn’t bear to be the Ripper would no longer have any power to restrain him at all.

He rolled onto his back and held his wound together with his hand and forced his eyes to the bloody glass. At least he had gotten that far. Even as far gone as he was, he had managed to do that much.

Even if he had to live, there might still be a little time.

Will hauled himself to his feet, almost too lightheaded to stand. He dragged himself to the replicator and asked for a dermal regenerator, and once it shimmered into existence he knitted himself back together, supporting his body against the wall with his other hand. Then he made his way to the console and closed the cabin door and began the slow process of preparing the shuttle for takeoff.

Maybe when he left the planet and the other minds were gone, he would no longer have the strength to follow through on this one last desperate gamble. Well. If that was how it went, then that was how it went.

He engaged the thrusters, and for the first and last time his shuttle rose from the surface of Daphne IV and darted out of the atmosphere into space.


	20. Chapter 20

Will never knew how long that trip took him. Weeks.

He did everything he could think of, during those long however-many weeks, to prevent himself from thinking. He kept a constant stream of subspace chatter playing, a substitute for the constant psychic background noise on Daphne IV, and he took meds to keep himself awake for as long as he could – the sleep deprivation blurred out the higher-level brain functions that he might otherwise use to logic himself out of this. And after the meds wore off and he was too exhausted to keep going, he only let himself sleep with tranqs, so that he wouldn't dream. Hannibal could find him there, where they dreamed. He might be able to keep him, if he found him. Then they could...

 _No. No, no, don't think, if you try to think you might let him think for you, don't think, just go_ –

His back and shoulders were permanently knotted, and his jaw was permanently sore from clenching. And the pain from his broken ribs was still there – he hadn’t healed them. They were the price he’d paid for letting that man live. He used the pain from them as an anchor tying him to himself, a constant reminder that for now he was still in control.

Besides, he didn’t want to do any more doctoring than he absolutely had to. He had to repress every scrap and shred of everything Hannibal knew.

_Don't even think about him. Don't think at all . Hannibal's dead._

_No. He isn’t._

Will knew that he didn’t have to do what he was doing now. He didn’t even _want_ to do it. He wanted to land the shuttle someplace nice and uninhabited and fix his broken ribs and sleep for about twenty hours, and then he wanted to think about all of the different lives he could have now, and then he wanted to go off and live them.

He smothered those thoughts under the pain in his body and the voices from the comm, and he followed the trail of hints from subspace until he found what he was looking for.

* * *

Aside from the soft beeping of instrument panels and the occasional whirr of a door, the bridge of the Chesapeake was still and quiet. Jack sat at the ready in the captain’s chair, but there was no real reason for him to be there. They hadn’t seen anything of note for the past ten days. They had been on light patrol duty near the galactic rim, ever since…

Well, it was generally felt by Starfleet brass that the crew of the Chesapeake would benefit from a few low-stress missions, considering.

Jack was considering getting up and leaving when Lieutenant Commander Katz looked up from the bridge’s Security console and said, “Captain, there’s a shuttle approaching us.”

The Lieutenant Commander had had a few decidedly un-Vulcan words to say about their most recent assignment. She had taken it, perhaps correctly, as a punishment for Jack rather than a kindness towards the crew. Now Jack could hear in her voice a hint of inappropriate excitement that _something_ was finally happening.

Jack glanced over his shoulder at her from the captain’s chair. “Status?”

Her fingers tapped across the surface of the console. “Looks like Ferengi tech. It seems fully operational. There are two life signs aboard, but they're relatively weak. They may need medical assistance.”

“No distress beacon?”

“None. Possibly their transmitters are knocked out.”

Lieutenant Lass turned from her station at Comms. “No,” she said, “the transmitters are working. The shuttle is hailing us.”

“On screen,” Jack said. Lass keyed in the code, and the viewscreen flickered to life.

There was silence on the bridge again.

White and trembling and damp all over with sweat, thin and frail and clutching his side and leaning his full weight on the shuttle console, was the man who had once been Lieutenant Will Graham. He stared at them through the viewscreen. He looked as if he were trying to breathe or speak.

Someone whispered “Captain...” Jack held up a hand.

Will took a long, shallow breath.

“I surrender,” he said. “Arrest me.” 

* * *

Security evacuated a wing of Sickbay and threw three layers of force fields up around it before beaming Will in, and Medical called up the ship’s Emergency Medical Hologram rather than risk any crewmen on treating him. But it was hardly necessary. Will passed out seconds after he rematerialized aboard – more from simple exhaustion than anything else, the EMH said. It was almost three days before he was conscious again.

And for those three days, between endless calls with Starfleet and the Trill Symbiosis Commission and meetings with Beverly regarding the increased security arrangements, Jack spent his spare time wondering if there was any possible way that this was not a trick or a trap.

Everything he had learned in the previous months told him that it must be. He knew that the person lying unconscious in Sickbay was not Will Graham, because Will Graham had ceased to exist when the Ripper had been placed inside him. And he knew what the Ripper was – he had studied its history in sickening detail after Will had run, and what he had read told him that the Ripper would never voluntarily give up his freedom.

A trap, then. That was what Starfleet though, what the Commission thought. What Beverly thought. It was what Jack thought, too, in his logical mind.

And yet Jack had seen Will’s face when he had surrendered, and he couldn’t abandon a tiny, irrational scrap of hope.

 _F_ _ight him._ Those were the last words Jack had said to Will, after watching him open up his crewmate’s throat. And now Will had come back...

Jack knew it was a foolish thing to hope for.

* * *

A musical note chimed in Jack’s quarters. It would have woken him up, if he had been capable of falling asleep that night.

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“Captain,” said Beverly, “the prisoner is awake.”

Jack swung himself out of bed. “Has he been moved?”

“He was transported directly to the brig as soon as he regained consciousness. Captain, regarding-”

“I’m aware of your objections, Lieutenant Commander, but I assure you that I will not allow my _feelings_ about this situation to influence my thinking when I speak with him.”

“I would never presume to suggest such a thing,” she said. “Just take care, that’s all.”

“I will,” Jack said. “Tell the brig that I’m on my way. Crawford out.”

Jack changed into a clean uniform and left his quarters. He tried not to think about whether Will could feel him coming. He arrived at the door to the brig and walked in without hesitating.

There he was. Him, and five guards. Will stood alone in his empty cell. He was moving his hand in slow patterns millimeters away from the force field, watching the energy crackle and glow under his fingers, risking a painful shock if he were to make contact.

Before Will glanced up at him, Jack saw his face in profile, and he noticed with a jolt that Will’s trails of Trill markings were gone. Other than that, he looked exactly the same as he had looked before. It reminded Jack of a child’s puzzle. _What’s different about this picture?_

“Hi, Jack,” Will said.

There was no sensible way to open a conversation like this.

“Hello, Will,” Jack said. “You look better.”

Will smiled. It was Will Graham’s smile. How could this man not be him?

“I feel better,” he said.

“I'm... pleased to see that you're safe.”

Will laughed. “You mean you’re pleased to see me safely locked up in here where I belong?”

He sounded almost cheerful. Jack was totally at a loss. He grasped for something else to say. “I hope the crew’s emotions aren’t causing you too much distress,” he said. “I'm sorry we can't put you somewhere more tolerable.”

“Don't worry about it,” Will said. “I've gotten a lot better at dealing with that. Hannibal taught me.”

Jack kept his face perfectly still, but he couldn’t quite repress the anger that flashed across his mind when he heard that name.

“Still holding a grudge?” Will asked. “Can’t say I blame you. He really was a world-class bastard, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Jack.

Will laughed again. He was still running his hand along the force field, watching the crackling light as it danced underneath his hand. Thus far, this was not a productive conversation.

“Will,” Jack said, “I know that you have been through a terrible ordeal. I need to ask you some questions about your, ah, experience, so that we can determine whether-”

Will stilled his hand and fixed his eyes on Jack. Jack had forgotten how unsettling those eyes could be, when Will wanted them to be. Velvety black, like the space between the stars. They seemed not to reflect the lights of his cell anymore.

That was when Jack was sure that this was not Will Graham.

“Will,” he said quietly. “Why did you come back here?”

“To surrender,” Will said.

_To surrender._

Jack had hardly ever felt less in control of his emotions. He buried them as quickly as he felt them – grief for what had been done to Will, guilt for the part he had played in it, hatred for the Ripper –

“Have something you want to say to him? He's right here, Jack. He's me.”

“I don't accept that,” Jack said.

“Neither did I,” said Will. “Still true.” He hesitated then – he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked almost...

“You knew, before,” he said. “Right after I was joined. You knew _something_. You should have had them put up a force field around sickbay before I woke up.”

 _No. I should have had that thing ripped out of your body._ “Believe me,” Jack said, “I have been telling myself that every day since the day this happened to you.”

“It didn't happen to me,” Will said. “I _did_ it.”

There was nothing Jack could think of to say after that. Will waited for a few moments to see if he would speak. Then he said, “You hate me, Jack. That’s one thing I regret. I always thought of you as a friend.”

This was intolerable. “I'm still your friend, Will.”

That familiar smile crept onto Will’s face again.

“You shouldn't be,” he said.

Enough. “Goodbye, Will,” Jack said. He turned away from the force field and headed for the exit door.

“Hey, I almost forgot,” Will said, as the brig doors slid open for Jack. “Sorry about that guard I killed.”

Jack couldn’t bring himself to turn around and look at him again. He stepped through the doors and let them glide shut behind him.

* * *

After they dimmed the lights in the brig, Will didn’t try to sleep. He didn’t think he’d be able to. It didn’t quite feel right yet to feel safe and still, for there to be nothing left for him to strain against. So he just sat on his bunk and curled up into himself like a broken harp string, and tried to let himself feel what it felt like to simply _exist._

It didn’t feel anything like he’d been afraid it would feel. It was almost anticlimactic.

He had thought he would be furious. As furious as he had been down on the planet. Like a wild animal hurling itself against the bars of a cage. But he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so free.

It was like he had spent his whole life flying through an endless murky nebula, and then he’d finally broken through the edge and seen the stars.

He didn’t feel like a different person than he had been before. He still felt like Will. But there were things that were different. There were things he understood now that he had never been able to understand before.

When he had first met Will Graham, before he had become him, he had thought that Will was delicate, vulnerable. Malleable. And he had thought so as Will Graham, too – had spent most of his life hiding away, with no one but Vulcans for company, for fear of being overwritten and destroyed.

They had both been so wrong.

He had learned so much about himself over those months on Daphne IV, things neither of him had ever suspected. His strength of will, his resilience, his bravery and endurance. The beauty and power of his gift.

Back there on the planet, his efforts had felt so pointless. But now that he could see himself more clearly, he understood the magnitude of what he’d done. He had made the Ripper struggle and suffer more than it had ever suffered in its life, and he had known that he was going to feel every ounce of that suffering himself, and he had known that it would make no difference in the end, and he had done it anyway.

Will was the most powerful person he had ever been.

He didn’t feel at all like he had lost. He felt as if he had taken the parts of himself that he had struggled so hard against and feared so much, and had placed them completely under his control.

And he knew that this feeling was exactly what losing would have meant to him, back before he had won.


	21. Chapter 21

During the Chesapeake’s journey back into the core of Federation space, Jack didn’t return to visit Will’s cell even once. Will was almost sure, in fact, that he could feel Jack avoiding him, skirting around the portion of the ship where Will was being held so as to keep himself out of mental range. In the absence of Jack, or of any other visitors, there was nothing for Will to do but wait. They would transfer him off of this ship soon enough. Then things would begin to happen.

For now, it was enough just to sit in his cell and exist. Everything he saw and felt fascinated him now, everything was worthy of close examination. The whole starship spoke to him with noise and clarity. He could lose himself for hours in the pattern of the carpet, or in the shock and gleam of the force field when he let it touch his hand; in the smell and taste of the food they brought him, no worse than what he had eaten as a crewman, or in the smooth disdainful texture of the minds of his guards. None of his reactions to these things belonged to Hannibal or to Will Graham or to any of the others. They were _his_ , and they were new, and they were beautiful to him.

He would get past this dreamy phase soon enough, he knew – it was perfectly normal for the newly joined. For now, he just let himself enjoy it.

That was how he spent his time on the journey back to Trill.

No one had told him where he was being taken, and he hadn’t bothered to ask. But after he and his guards beamed offship and rematerialized – Jack didn’t even come to watch when Will was transferred to the detention authorities, which actually stung a little – Will stole a glance through a bulkhead window and saw that they were in some Starfleet detention ship in orbit around Trill. Of course. The Symbiosis Commission would be wanting to deal with him personally, even if everyone involved agreed to the polite fiction that he be treated like any other Starfleet prisoner.

After the heat of the Vulcan-climate Chesapeake, this new ship felt cold to him. His new guards walked him to an interrogation room and chained his hands to the table and left him there to wait. He paid little attention to the guards. They weren’t nearly as interesting as the coolness of the metal surface of the table and the weight of the chains, and the shimmer of the force field as it was activated in front of him.

And then, after a long while – some length of time carefully calculated to break down his resolve, he thought with a tiny smile – he felt a Betazoid coming.

He began to sense her presence even before her shuttle docked with the ship, almost a full minute before he felt the guards who were bringing her. She was one of the most powerful psionic minds he had ever encountered. _How flattering,_ Will thought. So they weren’t going to let just any random psychic interrogate him.

He felt her pause fifty or sixty meters away from the interrogation room. He felt her steel herself. She could sense his power, too. A different kind of power.

He felt a twinge of sympathy for her. He had been on her side of the table far too many times. She wouldn’t have it as bad as he’d had it – she lacked his singular curse and gift of being half-Trill, she wouldn’t have to experience his feelings along with him – but she would still have to _see_. That would be bad enough.

Once, a few lifetimes back, the Ripper had drugged a Betazoid and taken him home with her. She had tied him up, but she hadn’t tortured him, not right away. At least, not with her hands. She’d just waited for him to wake up, and then she’d sat down across from him and shed her mental disguises and let him read her. She had reduced him to terrified screaming and pleas without a word or a touch. It had been fun.

There was no point in that sort of thing now, though. So out of professional courtesy, Will kept his outermost walls in place as the Betazoid woman walked in, and he gave her a chance to sit down and speak to him.

“Hello, Will,” she said. She was wearing her hair down in soft waves, and she’d addressed him politely, even kindly. The very picture of the non-threatening Good Cop. It was cute that they were bothering with such transparent manipulation.

“Hi,” he said. “What’s your name?”

She breezed past the question. “I’m here to ask you a few questions which are intended to verify your identity, and the accusations which have been made against you. Do you know what you’ve been accused of doing?”

“Couldn’t begin to guess. I’m pretty sure I plead guilty, though.”

“You’ve been accused of the murder of a Starfleet officer, and the theft of a Starfleet shuttle.”

Will almost laughed. Was that _all_? But come to think of it, he hadn’t actually bothered to confess to anything else yet. The only evidence they had of his true identity was the fact that it was obvious. “Yeah,” he said. “That was me.”

He watched her black eyes flicker as she read the surface of his mind. “All right,” she said. “Now I’ll need to ask you some questions about your previous hosts. As your last host, you claimed your name was Hannibal Fel. Was that correct?”

“No,” Will said. “Hey… listen. Sorry about this.”

He took a breath and closed his eyes and focused his mind, and then he wrenched his barriers down and opened himself up to her.

He heard her chair scrape against the floor as she started backward.

He opened his eyes again. She was pale, and her hand was pressed against the table – an old trick Will remembered, to stop it from shaking. She had known he was the Ripper already, of course, they wouldn’t have sent her in without briefing her thoroughly, but knowing and seeing, those were different things.

“I see,” she said. “Thank you for being open with me.” The picture of professionalism. Will was almost impressed. “Now I’d like to verify the names of the rest of your previous hosts, and their places of residence.”

The places they had killed, she meant. He’d been around, and the jurisdictional questions of his case must be extremely complicated.

He told her everything. There was no point in lying – she would have known if he had. And there was something nice about telling the truth and being believed, after all that time he’d spent hiding. He watched her face and feelings as she dug around inside his head to verify his list of names and homes. She was well-trained and refused to be distracted. She knew she was safe on the other side of the force field. But she was still afraid of him. She felt like prey. She heard him think so, and her prey-feeling grew.

Finally she asked him, “You told your captain that you came back because you wanted to surrender. Why?”

Will smiled, more to himself than at her. “Win/win,” he said. “I got to put the bastard in chains. And then I got to be him.”

She didn’t understand. That was all right. Will hadn’t understood either, at first.

“I kept trying to fight him,” he said. “But I didn’t want to. I wanted to give up. So I turned myself in. I knew I couldn’t hurt anyone if I turned myself in. And now I don’t have to fight anymore, and I can...”

He couldn’t find the words, but he didn’t need them. She could see.

She wanted to say something, something like ‘I’m sorry this happened to you.’ But she didn’t speak, because she knew what he would say if she did.

“I have everything I need for now,” she said. “Thank you for your cooperation.” She stood up from her chair. She couldn’t wait to get away, to untangle herself from him. He felt vaguely insulted.

 _Coward_ , he thought at her.

She threw him a horrified backward glance as she walked out of the interrogation room.

* * *

They never sent the Betazoid woman to him again – he imagined that if they’d tried, she would have refused – but they sent a string of others. For the next two months Will did almost nothing but answer questions from countless investigators, from every jurisdiction where he had ever killed or been suspected of killing. He hadn’t done the math on his victims before now, but there were hundreds. Centuries’ worth. This was going to take a long time.

He continued to be perfectly truthful – since he was already caught, there was no reason not to give the families a little closure, and to make a few investigators’ lives a little easier.

And besides, he had no admit to himself that it was sort of fun.

Except for his victims – and except, in those last few wrenching minutes, for Will Graham – no one had ever looked at him and known exactly what he was. Now the whole galaxy knew. Now his images, this face and every other face he’d ever had, were news on every single Federation world and half the rest of explored space. The legendary monster who had haunted the galaxy for so many hundreds of years, who had covered his tracks so well for so long that many people hadn’t believed he’d ever really existed.

On Betazed and Trill, on Vulcan and Earth and Romulus and Qo'noS and Ferenginar, there was hardly a single person now who didn’t know his name. Hardly a single person who didn’t know him as perhaps the most prolific murderer in recorded history.

Somehow it had never crossed his mind how thrilling that would be.

He would never be charged with most of the crimes he was confessing to. When they were done pulling his history from his head, he would be formally convicted only as Will the Ripper – a new host couldn't be held legally responsible for crimes that old hosts had committed. So it would only be the one murder, then. And theft of Starfleet property. Practically nothing. A normal man wouldn't even get life for that, he'd be rehabilitated and released. But he wasn't a normal man, of course. They would never let him leave.

If he ever wanted to see the outside of a prison colony again after his sentencing, he would have to rely on himself.

For he did fully intend to escape.

He was still proud of having had the strength to come here. But that decision had been made by a different person. A person who had been sure that there were things he simply couldn’t have, a person who had spent his entire life shrinking himself down and trying to prove that he could do almost everything a normal person could do.

It was hard to believe, now, that being a _normal_ _person_ had once been his highest ideal.

Once he saw his chance and escaped from Federation custody, he would use this newfound power to give himself the life he had always deserved to have. The life that the Ripper had wanted to give him from the first moment he had looked into his eyes.

But, of course, there was another possibility. There might be no chance, no escape. The Federation weren’t complete idiots, they knew what he was, and it was entirely possible that they would never let him escape at all. He had known that when he’d come here.

And if it happened that way, it would still have been worth it.

They might never let him go. They might keep him locked up in some prison colony until the day he died. But at least when he died, he’d die whole.

* * *

Will didn’t call on Hannibal often, there on the prison ship. He couldn’t exactly miss him, he wasn’t gone – Will always felt his presence swirled into the rest of himself – and the way it felt to split himself apart wasn’t the most comfortable thing. Besides, he was being watched all the time, and he wanted this singular magic of his to be his secret.

But sometimes he would need to see him there beside him, and he would mouth the words to himself so quietly that no one else could hear him, and he would be Will and Hannibal again.

It would have felt more natural if they had been able to speak out loud without being overheard, but there was no real need to. Anything they might have said to each other, they already knew. Even with the separation that the ritual made between their minds, they knew. There was something beautiful about that, almost sacred in a way – so they didn’t even try to whisper to each other. For now they could just exist, and feel a closeness that no one else alive could match.

They would simply sit together, near enough to to touch, and they would feel the phantom warmth and pressure of each others’ skin, and they would think together about all of the things they would do once they were free.

And then after a while they would flow together again, and they would be him, and he would be them.

* * *

Who would he choose, once he escaped?

He’d had many motives before, many profiles. Sometimes he’d been driven to kill by curiosity or anger, sometimes by a compulsion to make a certain type of person die. Sometimes for necessity; sometimes for pure sadism. Sometimes for beauty. And always, always for power.

In between interrogations and sleep and stolen moments with himself, he thought it over.

The guard had been a shame. Even now he took no real satisfaction in having silenced her, although he still remembered the incredible rush of her death, the gift she had given him. He would always he grateful to her for that. And he’d had no choice, of course. But he wouldn’t have sought her out.

The customer from the shop, the one he had used to torment himself – that man only seemed pathetic now, beneath his notice. He had been nothing but a convenient target to fixate on, just as the mugger in the alley had been. Neither of them would have been worth his time if they hadn’t offered themselves up to him.

He would not kill like Hannibal, for aesthetics and petty revenge. That didn't appeal to him at all.

Then he remembered the woman.

The human woman, the killer. The one whose mind Jack had made him dissect. The kind of person he’d been forced to absorb over and over again in Security, the kind who had tortured him just by existing near him. That woman whose sickening rage he’d had to feel, her hatred, the void where her soul should have been – what would it have been like to kill her, or someone like her? To feel that power over her, like he’d felt in the alley, to feel her terror the way he’d felt that man’s; and then to feel her die, feel her soul rush away into the blackness and feel himself fly with her into the void and see her vanish there, and then return to himself still blazing with life and look down at her lifeless body, finally empty of that hideous mind?

Oh. Oh, he could more than live with that.

Will Graham wouldn’t have liked it. Will was sorry for that. But even Will Graham would have admitted that it wasn’t the worst compromise. And really it was only sentimentality to take into account what Will Graham would want – more sentimentality than he had ever allowed himself in his hundreds of years of life.

He would always honor Will Graham’s memory. He would always love him. Every host he took from now until the day he died would love him. But they would love a man who had stopped existing almost a year ago, in his quarters on the USS Chesapeake. There was no Will Graham anymore to be horrified by the things that Will the Ripper did.


	22. Chapter 22

The interrogations slowed to once every other day or so, then to once or twice a week; and then one morning, without any preamble, one of Will’s guards handed him a dress uniform and told him it was time for his plea hearing. A formality – he had never pretended that he was anything but guilty, but he had to say so in front of a judicial panel before he could be sentenced by them. Starfleet’s notions of justice were much more ceremonial than his own.

The guards, all four of them, walked Will down the ship’s central corridor to a large and extremely beige conference room, in which the furniture had been rearranged to approximate a courtroom. Behind a long table facing the doorway sat a tribunal of high-ranking Starfleet officials covered in medals and pips, two human women and one Trill man. Aside from them and the guards, the room was empty, though the walls were lined with chairs. Briefly, Will prodded at the judges’ feelings and saw nothing but cold, dismissive professionalism. They’d been chosen well.

They wasted no time on formalities. Instead, one of the human women simply said to him, “Ripper. In the murder of Lieutenant T’Lu Etun of the USS Chesapeake, how do you plead?”

Some residual trace of respect for the uniform kept him from smirking or rolling his eyes. “Guilty,” he said.

“And in the theft of the shuttle Eno from the USS Chesapeake, how do you plead?”

“Guilty.”

“Very well,” she said. “We will reconvene within the next few days for your sentencing. This tribunal is adjourned.”

With that, the guards marched him back out through the sliding doors. The whole thing had taken less than three minutes. _Waste of a dress uniform,_ Will thought.

The sentencing would be an equal waste of time. There was no chance he would be given anything less than the maximum possible penalty – indefinite detention in some penal colony or prison ship until such time as he was considered to be ‘rehabilitated,’ which in practice would of course be never.

He wouldn’t try escaping during transport. They would be prepared for him then. It would be better to cooperate for a while, long enough to let his new guards get a little careless around him. He would search their minds for weaknesses and find the ones who could be manipulated, and he would begin to work on them; and then, one day, an opportunity would present itself.

It might take years. But time meant something different to him now than it had meant before, and he felt he could afford to be patient.

* * *

Five more days of waiting before the guards handed him another dress uniform and told him it was time. Then the same march down the same corridor; the same beige conference room again, with the same three medal-spangled officials presiding. Now, though, the chairs on either side of the room were filled with perhaps two dozen dignitaries and spectators – some lower-ranking Starfleet officials, a handful of Trill from the planetary government and the Symbiosis Commission, an uncharacteristically calm Klingon diplomat.

One of the Starfleet officials was Jack. He didn’t turn his head to look at Will. His mind pulsed with grim anticipation.

The guards directed Will to the lone empty chair in the center of the room. As he sat, he felt a strange energy ripple through the crowd.

One of the women behind the table – the same one who had taken his plea – began to speak. “This sentence was not reached lightly,” she said. A few of the minds in the room shifted uncomfortably. Jack’s did not. “This is an extraordinary case, and in many ways without precedent. Rest assured that Starfleet has the full support of the Trill Symbiosis Commission in this matter.”

For the first time since his surrender, a flicker of doubt flashed across Will’s mind. What did she -

“The symbiont known as the Ripper is sentenced to indefinite detention aboard the prison hospital orbiting Keller VII.”

Something clicked into place in Will's mind, and too late, he saw the trap spring shut.

“The Ripper’s current host will be provided with another symbiont and released.”

No.

No, _no_ -

Hoarsely, quietly, he said, “That’s _murder_.”

Hypocritical for him to object to that, maybe. But it was true.

“The facts of this case,” said the judge, “make it clear that the symbiont alone was responsible for the crimes committed while occupying its current host, and that the host was compelled to act against his will. Considering these facts...”

Will could barely hear her. Whatever she was saying, it was just a bureaucratic smokescreen. A joined Trill was an individual. To split one apart was to kill it.

Most of the Trill in the room agreed, he could feel it. They knew that this was murder. Most of them did not care.

“You can’t,” Will said, “you can’t do this to me, I _surrendered_ , I've _cooperated_ with you-”

“Yes. And you intend to continue cooperating precisely as long as you feel you must, after which more people will die.”

There was no possible response Will could give to that.

Nothing about this was legal. It went against every ridiculous moral Starfleet claimed to stand for, and it didn’t matter, because no one was going to stop it from happening anyway.

And they were going to do it now, today, before anybody changed their minds.

Will sprang from his chair and turned to run, but he knew it was pointless. They stunned him into unconsciousness before he took a single step.

**Author's Note:**

> [Over on Tumblr, bonearenaofmyskull had the fantastic notion of a half-Betazoid, half-Trill Will Graham and a joined Trill Hannibal Lecter. I thought it was the best idea I'd ever heard.](http://theglintoftherail.tumblr.com/post/139090265887/theglintoftherail-bonearenaofmyskull)  
>  I want this to make sense to Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike, so don’t hesitate to send me a message either if I get something wrong, or if you don’t understand something.


End file.
